Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

A good reminder to not get stuck in local fad maximums.

Remember when the future of every single company was gamification or bust? Remember when the seemingly only viable business model was skinner boxing rube middle america housewives with no self control (oddly, middle eastern princes also would spend tens of thousands a month on those silly in app purchase games, except they can afford it and don't have their lives ruined with addict-induced credit card debt)?

I don't have a point. Just notice how the "tech press" and fads and media sweeps through in its ever-shortening attention span to the point where they aren't good signals for anything anymore.

View on HN

Empty, derivative Facebook games are not any more "skinner box" than anything else we either enjoy or do out of necessity. Almost any game ever created could be described as a "skinner box." Completing work units for a salary could be described as a "skinner box." If there is something especially bad or manipulative about Facebook games, it isn't that they are a "skinner box."

Chess isn't a skinner box, neither is Solitaire or Skyrim. Even poker is less of a skinner box than the games we're talking about.

Hm. I'm not talking scientifically here or anything, but I've always felt the lack of any kind of depth in most Zynga games makes them feel very skinner box with little pretense beyond that. Most games have complicated stories or game play mechanics. Many Zynga games seem to be "Fill up these three bars by clicking these buttons. Watch them fill. It feels good doesn't it."

Personally I couldn't say that about many other games/work.

No, they very much are a skinner box. Read any good tutorial or paper in the field (say, http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper06_zagal_etal.pdf ). The revenue model depends on base applied behaviorialism.

And indeed, that's why they've hired at least one behavioral psychologist. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940668,00....)

Perhaps you're unaware that Zynga explicitly treats games like skinner boxes? Their whole deal was using metrics to manipulate the feedback loop to maximize profit.

Even the most mainstream traditional games were designed to be fun -- they might aim for the lowest common denominator, they may artificially inflate the game length, but the goal was still entertainment. Because all they wanted you to do was buy the game.

That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to not just play the game, but to feel a need to play the game. That means their goal is getting you addicted to the skinner box. The mechanics of such a game are all built to reinforce this goal. Zynga took this to its logical conclusion by A/B testing the various game parameters.

As Tim Rogers said, such games are "a love letter from a computer virus."

http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=1076

(Warning: long but insightful article (But if you recognize the author's name you'd already know that.))

>That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to play the game, to feel a need to play the game.

Zynga focuses on mechanics that promote habits, but to say that's the only approach incentivized by F2P is a pretty myopic view of the market.

The F2P model incentivizes addictive gameplay more than other genres, but it's not like building an addicted game was a bad thing pre-F2P. Valve's DOTA 2, for instance, has largely identical gameplay to its 100% free Warcraft 3-based ancestor (tangentially, Team Fortress 2 isn't much of a skinner box either).

> That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to not just play the game, but to feel a need to play the game.

This is actually more true for subscriptions than for F2P. With F2P they need you to have a reason to actively buy things. With subscription, they need you to play enough to find the next month worth paying for.

Whereas one-time box sales the way you're talking about is all about getting you to make the purchase at all.

> A good reminder to not get stuck in local fad maximums.

That's a good goal - but how do you know in advance whether it's a fad (like Zynga) or the real deal (like Facebook)?

Using facebook as an example of the "real deal" may be a mistake. A better example might be Intel.

Right on. Facebook is the opposite of a correct example here.

You can just ask me. I've been telling people that Zynga was a dangerous fad that's not worth chasing for years.

I think it's less about it being a fad and more about it passing the ethical sniff test. If you end up working for an unethical company, a small error can blow up into a crisis because you were already dancing the line.

When I look at my Facebook news feed, my relatives who don't have a lot of money to throw around use Facebook to post baby photos and talk to their friends. They use Zynga to spend their (little) money on virtual cows/rows in a relational database. Both of these are mindless ways to pass the time, but only one of these should obviously raise red flags as something you should not want to be associated with.

"business model was skinner boxing rube middle america housewives with no self control"

That quote made my day. HAve you been reading Gibson or Stross novels lately? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com