When Zynga - undoubtedly the largest and most significant social game developer out there today – went public some days ago, it happened in the wake of a lot of speculation and rumors about the actual value of the company. Both in terms of their organizational structure, criticized for its next-to-permanent crunch periods, lack of creative freedom as well as a broken code base, and the actual profit potential of their games.
Their Ville series – including famous FarmVille, Facebook top-ranking CityVille and their most recent runaway hit CastleVille – have without a discussion changed the face of gaming and dominated the way we think of and define social games today. While they did not invent the mechanics, they refined them and diffused the innovations to the wide masses – in a larger way than most game developers care to consider – making it, in many ways, the new public face of gaming.
A main summary of their game mechanics would probably include:
- “Energy”-based actions, of which the player must wait or buy more energy after running dry in order to continue playing and progressing
- Active player recruiting as part of the game progression and gameplay
- No considerable gameplay challenge besides using resources in the optimal order and fighting your own impatience
- An ability to skip any action and quest through hard currency – primarily acquired through purchase
While many have expressed harsh opinions against these games, calling them unethical and plainly bad, I can understand how some people see entertainment in their rather banal approach, where progression happens within a tightly controlled flow. And even though it makes me rather annoyed that active recruiting of other people to the game can be a necessary gate for progression – unlike the necessity to purchase, which is more of an option and bonus – their games are still free, after all, and provide quite some value for no down payment.
The real question and debate is rather: are they games?
While the debate for what a game really is and how it can be defined has not come to conclusion, I personally view the Ville-model as a pure instance of Gamification, which in short is applying certain game principles to non-game contexts.
Do we jump to the conclusions that gamified services etc. are actually games? No, that is why the term gamification has been coined. So why do we confuse Zynga’s “social games” with games? In reality, they share very precise characteristics with an ideal implementation of gamification:
- Every action is tracked and added to a progression tree, constantly rewarding the user for life-time commitment.
- Few features and possibilities are available initially. Instead, they are unlocked over time through an accumulation of actions and engagement.
- It is rewarded to spread the word and invite more friends to the cause.
- It is possible to achieve all, or at least by far the most features and rewards over time with just standard engagement (which requires commitment and persistence though).
- It is always possible to “jump ahead” and skip any wait by paying.
If you take the Ville-based model and remove these mentioned characteristics, then I would say we end up with nothing more than a pure simulator.
Now, can that not be a game? Surely we have plenty of simulator games on the market, mostly in the racing genres and other real-world imitations. The key difference, though, is that these simulators often contain implicit or explicit goals that a player can complete – and even if not, like the case of Sim City, they at least contain states of failure and success, providing the player a challenge to overcome, if he or she so choose to take on the challenge.
The Ville-based model is instead based on the philosophy of only rewarding the player, taken to the highest extreme, where few things can ever go wrong – and if they do, it’s because you didn’t spend enough time in the game, didn’t recruit enough friends or didn’t pay. Which boils the player type in Ville-games down to three types:
- The patient, where it is fun to wait
- The recruiter, where it is fun to get friends to join the cause
- The spender, where it is fun to buy
If you view either of these three as a fun and challenging context, then I guess Ville-games could be fun. But I doubt many would argue both 1 and 2 is much fun – for 2 it is especially true if the cause is not a passion of your own (such as volunteer work).
And there’s 3; spending money. I guess most people enjoy that. We enjoy it almost no matter what we buy. It feels great to buy. But we see one other area, where spending money is framed as the activity in itself, with a very bad yet attractive value proposition: gambling.
That is why I see most Zynga games, predominantly their Ville-model games, as little more than a gamification of gambling, with an even worse yet maybe even more attractive value proposition: while you can’t win any money, you can almost always get bigger, better and more beautiful in the game – not the least compared to your social circle.
Is that a bad thing? Or even unethical? Not really. But should we be careful in calling it games and let it shape the way the general public perceive gaming?
Yes.