Author: Jesper

[Updated September 1st to reflect that I was referring to the criticism that Ian Bogost was initially cited for, rather than his more in-depth post.]

Here is the point: Gamer prejudices against social games are verbatim copies of general prejudices against video games. Within video game culture, we have spent decades trying to make video games respectable, but now we are simply taking the prejudices against us, and regurgitating them at a new form of video game, looking down on social games the way that culture at large has been looking down on video games. We have made social games into the video games of video games.

In July, we had seminar at the NYU Game Center on the issue of social games. Aki Järvinen (a reformed academic who now works at Digital Chocolate) gave a talk on social game design, and on social game definitions. Ian Bogost gave his promised anti-social game talk, and launched his Cow Clicker FarmVille parody.

In some of the media coverage of Ian’s game, I ended up being cited for the following:

According to New York University games researcher and theorist Jesper Juul, social games are “brain hacks that exploit human psychology in order to make money.”

Which wasn’t my point at all. Let me explain. Consider this quote from a blogger that, building on Jesse Schell, presents this criticism of FarmVille:

… the primitive kind of manipulations you see in FaceBook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. … the ways in which these games exploit the psychology of adults and children.

And consider the criticism that Ian Bogost was originally cited for. [Update: Compare to his nuanced comments here.]

[FarmVille gives] experiences more like [Skinner] boxes, like behaviorist experiments with rats.

Now, doesn’t this kind of language sounds oddly familiar? Exploiting psychology, manipulating, and just being in it for the money? Behaviorist experiments? Here is a quote from someone critical of video games in general, exploiting children and so on:

… the video game industry hides behind a First Amendment veil in order to exploit children for the sake of corporate profit.

And in their 1983 book Mind at Play, Loftus & Loftus explicitly compared video games to Skinner boxes.

In other words, the standard criticism against social (and casual) games is identical to traditional criticisms against video games as such. Gamer culture hasn’t exactly invented a new language here, but simply copied the familiar prejudices of parents and of the Jack Thompsons of the world.

I think this is pretty weak. At the very least criticism should be specific. Do social games involve brain hacks any more than WoW does? Any more than BioShock does? Any more than Shakespeare? I am not so sure. How would any art form not involve human psychology?

Of course, this doesn’t mean that FarmVille is a Great Game, it just means that we should try to control our inner Jack Thompson echo machine a little. It also does not mean that we have to love Zynga’s business practices, but it becomes ridiculous when I hear people contrast social games with the traditional game industry by saying that the traditional game industry as such is all about experiences and art, but not about money. It’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s completely legitimate to dislike social games – we don’t have to like everything, but there is a reason why people are playing these games, and it’s not a mystery: It’s nice to grow things. It’s nice to do things with your friends. It’s nice to give and receive gifts. It’s nice to play a game that allows you to schedule your playing time. And so on.

I also find StarCraft II more exciting, but I think we can learn something by acknowledging that new games can be interesting by breaking with our expectations of what a game should be. I would like to hear some more advanced discussion of social games.

And we should also avoid assuming that we are clever and able to see through tricks, advertising, and so on, but that they (the people who play these strange games) are unreflected and naïve. I leave you with a picture of the fence hack in FarmVille, where the author’s avatar has been fenced in to fool the FarmVille pathfinding algorithm, speeding up many common tasks. This is a common trick. People will do complicated things in games – all games – if they feel motivated to do so.

The Nielsen company’s latest study show that online games have edged out email as the 2nd-largest time sink online in the U.S.

Progress, I think.

(The result may be partially due to users shifting personal communication from email to social networks.)

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Top 10 Sectors by Share of U.S. Internet Time
RANK	Category	Share of Time June 2010	Share of Time June 2009	% Change in Share of Time
1	Social Networks	22.7%	15.8%	43%
2	Online Games	10.2%	9.3%	10%
3	E-mail	8.3%	11.5%	-28%
4	Portals	4.4%	5.5%	-19%
5	Instant Messaging	4.0%	4.7%	-15%
6	Videos/Movies	3.9%	3.5%	12%
7	Search	3.5%	3.4%	1%
8	Software Manufacturers	3.3%	3.3%	0%
9	Multi-category Entertainment	2.8%	3.0%	-7%
10	Classifieds/Auctions	2.7%	2.7%	-2%
	Other	34.3%	37.3%	-8%
Source: The Nielsen Company

A New York University announcement:

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Expand your mind by taking a class in an exciting new field: There are still spaces available in two Game Center classes this fall, Introduction to Game Design and Game Studio! Both classes are free of prerequisites, so they are open to all students. Find them on Albert under Tisch Open Arts Electives.

Students: Please pass this information along to your friends.

Professors: Please pass this information along to your students.

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Introduction to Game Design

(Two Sections Available)

INSTRUCTOR: Eric Zimmerman
Course Number: H95.1605.001/H95.2605.001 (Section 1) &
H95.1605.003/H95.2605.003 (Section 2)
Meeting Tuesday from 9:30 to 12:15AM and 2 to 4:45PM
Lab Time: Thursday 6 – 9PM (Both sections)

This class is an intensive, hands-on workshop addressing the complex challenges of game design. The premise of the class is that all games, digital and non-digital, share common fundamental principles, and that understanding these principles is an essential part of designing successful games. Learning how to create successful non-digital games provides a solid foundation for the development of digital games.

In this workshop, students will; analyze existing digital and non-digital games, taking them apart to understand how they work as interactive systems; create a number of non-digital games in order to master the basic design
principles that apply to all games regardless of format; critique each other’s work, developing communication skills necessary for thriving in a collaborative field; explore the creative possibilities of this emerging field from formal, social, and cultural perspectives; develop techniques for fast prototyping and iterative design that can be successfully applied to all types of interactive projects.

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Game Studio

INSTRUCTOR: Katherine Isbister

Course Number: H95.1608.001/H95.2608.001
Meeting Thursday from 9:30 – 12:30AM
Lab Time: Wednesday 5:30 – 9PM

In this course, students learn best practices in digital game development, working in small teams to produce complete games. The course introduces students to project management, production roles, playtesting, considerations of audience and platform, and other practical concerns in building games.

The course will combine lecture and occasional guest speakers with practical exercises and milestones in building a completed digital game.

If you, like me, have fond memories of Matthew Smith’s 1983 game Manic Miner (playable here), chances are you are from Europe. It’s a pivotal game in the European history of games, but little known in the U.S.

Someone out there is apparently sufficiently fond of the game to compose an opera about it.

(Philosophical question of the day: does composing an opera about something always imply a fondness of it?)

(Via GameSetWatch.)

In my experience, we Europeans tend not to think of soccer (yes, football) as particularly left-wing or democratic, or egalitarian, or non-competitive, but with the World Cup just starting, a few U.S. commentators have been arguing in full force for exactly that.

Here’s Gary Schmitt explaining that Americans (read: U.S. Americans) only enjoy sports in which the best team wins. Latin Americans and Europeans are different of course.

For sure, there may be a number of reasons that is the case but my suspicion is that the so-called “beautiful game” is not so beautiful to American sensibilities. We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail. Of course, the fact that is often not the case when it comes to soccer may be precisely the reason the sport is so popular in the countries of Latin America and Europe.

Oh, Gary’s evidence that soccer is not about the best team winning: The U.S. beating Spain last year in the Confederations Cup.

Here’s Matthew Philbin similarly arguing that soccer doesn’t require skill, agility and so on, unlike American sports.

And to conservatives, the troubling aspects of the game aren’t confined to the pros. Soccer requires comparatively little from children but the ability to run after the ball – the risk of failure for anyone except maybe the goal keeper is zero. Even the strong chance that any given game will end in a tie makes it attractive for parents reluctant to impart life’s difficult lessons to young kids.

It must baffle soccer partisans that Americans haven’t taken to their game. After all, the United States is a sports-obsessed nation.

Americans look to sports to teach work ethic, teamwork and responsibility, in addition to the physical and mental skills necessary for competition. They love underdogs and “Cinderella stories” and “Evil Empires” and “bums,” “Hogs” and “No-Name Defenses.”

And Americans like to think their sports reflect something about them. Michael Shackelford of Bleacher Report praised football because it, “requires a combination of power and agility, brute strength, and grace … In other words, it requires American characteristics in order to succeed.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

(Links via Gawker.)