A friend of mine is a videogame agent. I've been told I should write them. But I rarely play them. I've read Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" - the book Tim alludes to in Chapter One - and there was something not-quite-right about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Tim makes a case that Jane McGonigal is batshit insane. It is interesting to see the "other side of the coin" as McGonigal's book bends over backwards to avoid addiction metaphors, after pointing out in the first chapter that Starcraft and Warcraft actually modify their reward systems downward the longer you play them in one sitting in order to avoid full-on addiction. The MMORPG guys have figured out that you don't want "addicts" you want "habitual users" and that if you can keep them just this side of eating chili out of a trough with an ice-filled bucket of Mountain Dew cans by their side, you will make more money out of them in the long run. Zynga, on the other hand, is all about getting that buck seventy out of everyone because it increases the odds of turning you into a $10,000 whale. I have an inlaw that plays Farmville. She has her wife, her sister, and her cousin helping her with her "farm" (addiction). Zynga is effectively holding three people hostage to one person's Farmville habit. If a drug did that even the hippies would argue to ban it on human rights violations alone, but instead you can buy credits at 7-11. McGonigal argues that games like Farmville work because we derive pleasure from accomplishment, particularly when it comes to simple chores: filing is fun if you can reduce a pile of papers to a neatly-stacked cabinet, and brick-laying is fun if you can turn a pile of stones into a wall. Her conclusion from this is that in order to make housekeeping fun, you should turn it into a game in which you earn points and offers a few examples... without pointing out that nobody continues the "game" for longer than a week. And I think that's the real problem with the "game economy" right now - rather than a "perceived value for your money" metric to drive sales of expensive games, it's all about figuring out how to hook someone so you can shake them down. If you look at the "top grossing" apps on Apple's App Store, most of them are bald, ugly vehicles for extorting in-game currency. Games are no longer designed to be "fun" they're designed to be rewarding, addictive chores. Reddit, anyone?
The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly. It's psychological coercion disguised as entertainment. These are slot machines in disguise.
The cynic in me says that is wasn't so much the nature of it, but the legal issues of having kids buying these things with a credit card without some control. I think they should also let you download freeware without having a valid credit card attached, and only have you initiate that process when you want to purchase something. Yeah, but that would hurt their revenue. :) You know, public company, shareholders before anything that isn't illegal.