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General: The Life of a Social Gamer
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In this week's Player Perspective column, Jaime Skelton takes a look at the social gamer. Jaime's been spending time on what some would call the Dark Side: Social games on Facebook. See what she learned, if anything, during her adventure!
Over the past week, I've been entrenched on the other side of the fence. No, not sitting with developers – I mean the other side of the gaming fence, the side we talk dirty about. Social gaming. All those addictive little Facebook apps that have people farming, gardening, cooking, raising pets, building zoos, and hiring hitmen. I let myself completely soak in the degeneration that's killing dogs, families, and gaming as we know it. At least, that's what I heard on the internet.
Check out the rest of Jaime's thoughts about social gaming.
Comments
This article should be called "Explaining why gamers say Facebook games are not actually games, and they are not fun." Your description of how you spend your time with your games covers that quite well I'd say.
Facebook games do suck up people's time, and people get addicted to them far more then regular games. The reason this is so fascinating is the fact that there isn't an ounce of fun involved with those games either. Perhaps one day people will write down how they "play" these games like you did, read back over it, and then realize "Holy crap i'm wasting my time and my life with this terrible crap!"
I personally look at zynga as a blessing in disguise. They are exposing more of the general public to pseudo massively multiplayer social games.
Nearly every man and his dog has a facebook account.
What new mmo's have to do is tap into this market that has been prepped and ready.
Social gameplay tied with traditional mmo aspects that would appeal to both markets.
Just have to find the right mix:
- Not too casual so the hardcore gamer is turned off.
-Casual and fun enough to drop in from time to time.
So for this to work would mean a skill up as you afk style of game. Similar to eve. Similar to all the zynga games.
It looks like the right model.
I tend to see social games evolving into as a pure advertising venue as they can get away with. The spam is the point - the games are constantly using the plea for help to raise awareness of their existance and reward spreading participation. When they meet MMOs, I expect the social game itself to become increasing slimmed down to minimum gameplay required to disguise the action of endorsing a product for a buff ingame - essentially meat-flavored microtranslations.
I have to admit I had expected social games (as a profitable vehicle) to be a fad that had burnt itself out by now. I'm not quite ready to admit being wrong, but they have outlasted my expecations.
Honestly no one who plays mmo's should be on here spouting anything, what is your idea of fun is not the same as someone elses and because you can't experience the fun they do what's the point of making yourself look too ignorant to understand it. MMO players spend half or more of their free time glued to monitors grinding away at levels for a sword that is exactly 0.03% more powerful than the one you have now but here we are criticizing others choice of gaming.
Yes they suck up peoples time but no more than mmo's suck up peoples time or console games if that is what they like to play then so be it atleast they don't often spend money on these games, go to forums to cry and moan about how horrible the game is while often times continuing to play it too.
Social Games aren't for me, I played them for a few months until I realized I was going down the same path I'd let mmo devs take me down and smartly quit but hell since I still like to play with pixels and sprites who am I to criticize someone elses.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I like this new staff member. He's on top of everything, keeps posting things we want to know, and keeps it simple without the dreaded wall of texts!
So keep posting like this please!
Pepsi1028
PEPSI!!!!!
Get out of your box already...
Actually, Jamie's been here for a whie now, and we like her too! ;-)
Interesting article. I've not really made up my mind about these social games yet. I play two of them at the moment, and not the largest one. I figured it was a way to connect to my non-gamer friends and family members who actually enjoy these games, and to get exposure to the appeal. i play them for about 20 minutes a day mostly, but do find it a little irritating, espcially with Mafia Wars, that i do infact get penalized for not playing as much and as often as I can. It's interesting, and worth a look at for those who haven't tried them yet. It's perfectly fine to hate the games, but i find it out to see such disdain from some people who don't even bother to try it.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Please post a link to a website that contains productive video games. I would love to hear about this other side...
I've got many a friend and relative who are sucked into the time sinks of those social games. Luckily I was able to see their dilemas and hear from a few of their spouses on the complaints they had of them playing these games. So when I was finally dragged kicking and screaming onto face book I told them to shove all their game invites as I would have none of it. Thos games are just a syphon of good and productive time.
At least with my MMOs I can determine when and if I feel like logging in and burning a few hours of my time up. I'm not by any means obligated or penalized for doing so.
What I noticed about FarmVille is people like me, who only monoculture the crop with the best money/time ratio get bored and leave. The people who stay and are having fun put a lot of thought and time into making a good looking, well designed farm. And that makes sense. In MMOs with housing, some people put a lot of time and effort into decorating, achieving impressive results that are fun to share with others. That is at least one reason why some people have fun in FarmVille.
I tried most of the popular ones at Facebook and have to say most are decent.However, the time sucking thing was not my issue with the games. I have plenty of time. If I did not I would not be looking for a mmorpg to play.
It was the slowness of flash. Like everything else, once adobe gets their hands on it, it gets bloated and the same happened with flash. What used to be so fast is now just the most sluggish graphics device I have found on the internet.
I am running a quad-core machine with 512mb of ram and can play anything I have tried to play. My machine is less than 6 months old and yet when I tried playing those games, espcially farmville, it was like trying to move through a mountain of sludge. That is just crazy for a simple flash game to take so long.
I may have alot of time on my hands but I am not going to spend it moving in slow motion.:)
If we fail to change the things of today, they will become the lucid nighmares of tommorrow.
It's unreal isn't it? I can't even get the games to run well on my laptop, and on the desktop I built which i game with now it runs fine, but fine was never great compared to traditional games anyway.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
You should be thankful you can even check your e-mail.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
Ooops! LOL< That was my old puter, the new one has 4 gbs ram and it is a desktop.
If we fail to change the things of today, they will become the lucid nighmares of tommorrow.
Having taken a similar route through the plethora of facebook games only 1 has managed to retain my attention, that 1 being Kingdoms of Camelot.
It doesn't have much in the way of animations as it's essentially a build-stuff-up game much like many other facebook titles, however there are 2 seemingly innocuous yet important differences.
Firstly it has a chat function, you can chat globally or to your alliance (the game's version of guilds), secondly is it is a war game where you can if you so choose attack other players, this is somewhat limited but gets more complex & involved when there are multuiple players or even multiple alliances working together.
It's still got the usual gamut of glitches & bugs and things that need tweaking or expanding on, but it offers through only a few simple means a far more involved game than most Facebook fare, it does lack in 1 feature that a ton of zyngas games rely on & that is customisation, but that is actually less of a concern with KoC.
There is no difference between social games and mmo's I've played many of them for a six month period and I don't recall these obligations to play them or the penalties. If I play SWG and have harvesters I need to check them for power and to make sure they aren't full (I doubt SWG is the only game that uses a system like this either). And in every mmo you level at the early stages at a rate of like a level an hour until you hit midway to max then you are looking at countless hours of "obligated" time to continue the climb. Social games work the same way if you don't want to play then don't yeah you may ruin some crops or miss out on some money but nothing forces you or obligates you to these games any more than mmo's.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Really?
Well, im glad she is a poster on here. I emjoy her findings and threads....
Pepsi1028
PEPSI!!!!!
Get out of your box already...
Would love to read about the 'social gamers' in MMORPGs. I consider them to be more 'social' than the facebook apps, personally.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Most of the games you are talking about are simulation games, and stop thinking of "winning" , then they are fun to play. Yes, there are goals, but if you don't think of the journey as fun, there is no point in playing.
You can play them casually, checking once a day, and puttting them on hold. In Farmville, if you are going to be away for awhile, stop planting, and harvest your trees, or work with your animals when you get to it-- nothing will happn. In some games, nothing goes bad if you are gone for awhile, even the crops -- the games are different.
The fun is, albeit simply, making a place that's works for you, your fantasy farm (mine is more fantasy theme park), your fantasy island, your fantasy fronteir. If you are about how it looks, and make a good "pretend home", then it's fun. And you don't need a lot of friends. On one game, I have one friend, another game 7 friends, another game 8 friends. I never hit up my friends to play -- I see if my facebook friends are playing a particular game. If they are, I ask if they want to be my neighbor. Friends have two benefits -- aside from helping your friends, the fun is also in seeing how they have their farm, frontier area, island set up. You get to be a tourist, and what they do gives you ideas on setting up your place.
Kingdoms of Camelot is different -- looks like, mostly, a strategy game.
Regards,
mszv
This article made me grin, captures all that is bad about social gaming on FB and should be stickied somewhere the unwary might see it and save themselves some headaches.
I won't play any game that requires me to log in every x hours to progress, nor will I play a game where having the most "friends"=winning. I messed around with The Agency game a bit on FB, and looked on the "fan page" for it and saw all these people begging for others to add them as "friends" to enlarge their agencies. No thanks. That's where bright ideas like Real ID come from
I have a friend who plays Farmville and who has three facebook accounts (!) to avail of bonuses and stuff that you (apparently) get from recruiting friends etc. She keeps going on about how sick she is of it....and yet still logs on a few times a day to look after her crops...on all accounts. Eeep!
A friend at work plays Mafia Wars and he says the same thing, he's bored stupid with it, "never really enjoyed it".... yet can't stop playing it.
Some of it is almost like the same logic you hear from MMO players who have 100+ days /played in an MMO, they just can't walk away from the time investment, even though, logically, they aren't enjoying themselves anymore, and any more time that they spend is likely to be grudging, rather than fun.
I've blocked notifications from Farmville etc. after my homepage started filling up with "Blah found a lost sheep" and "Blabber's corn is looking ready to pop" (or whatever...I made the last one up)...because I really could care less about those games and how people are doing in them. Always amazes me when you go to the game section and discover people with 10-15 of these games listed....where do they find the time for it all? Or, like the jaded MMO player, are they just game-hopping and hoping to find something that they'll enjoy enough to stick to for more than a week or two?
I played Mafia Wars for about six months. Whenever I went to FB to check on what family was up to it became habit to spend 5 minutes buying properties and doing missions. The main reason I quit playing that game is that you couldn't fight anyone unless you had at least 500 friends in your mafia family. I just couldn't force myself to go on begging people to add me just so I could stand a chance at winning a fight. Never bothered with any of the other Zynga games.What is hillarious to me is my uncle, who owns about 200 acres of land is totally addicted to Farmville. He spends all day working his farm then every evening gets online to manage his digital farm.
People didn't said that, at least in farmville, a player can choose to don't play for months if they want to. If you don't crop seeds, then you won't lose money and you can play whenever you want, because the trees won't die, neither the animals, and there isn't any account deletion to be afraid of... and the best of this, is the players aren't just purchasing to have the higher lvl between their friends, they are looking for other things too. I'm a former farmville player, i just got tired of it because is always doing the same thing, but you know, the best of this game is you chose when to go, if you want to go, and there isn't such thing as an "active player" in order to be capable of playing the game to its fullest.
Many mmorpg's just make the player lose interest because we have to be active players in order to have a guild, to participate in wars or simillar things. Having the opportunity to play when they feel like and play the game at its fullest is the best thing a game can offer, and many FB games give that. And even ppl that don't like to play games, play these games, I mean, my girlfriend just hates most games for except of Sims, N64 Mario and Mortal Combat (who could've known o.o), and Farmville (using my account and hers). Maybe the mmorpg creators and devs should think this if their objective is to have a lot of players and be successfull... One of the worst things mmorpgs has is the need to "play all the time" in order to be "a good player", be successfull and be able to play the game at its fullest.
Just my opinion, but a thing to look for and think about. Is easy to criticize games that we don't like. Every good gamer and good dev need and should search for the Good and Bad points of each kind of game and be able to build a great game. I mean, WOW used a lot of things other games already had, but they did it in order to be successfull, because even a game with a big community can fail big time if it doesn't deliver, dont you think? and i'm not a WOW player, I just tried it and left.
Good write-up Jamie. I am one of those people who was addicted to the social games on Facebook (notice that I said WAS). I opened a FB account early last year and within a few days was introduced to Mafia Wars. I quickly realized the fact that the larger your family was, the better your chances of surviving and the stronger your play would be, so I started recruiting friends. That was my downfall.
As my friends list grew, they would invite me to play other games - Farmville, Yoville, The Agency, Special Forces, Vampire Wars, and a plethora of others. Eventually, my friends list was in the thousands (literally!) - and I should add that I became a triple-tagged (clan members use tags on their names to identify them), very strong Mafia Wars player, I was playing seventeen games (eight very actively) not to mention all of the other apps that aren't really games per se but require time too, had a second FB account, and was spending an average of sixteen to eighteen hours a day on FB! At the time, I was not working due to a work-related injury and had just quit playing LOTRO for various reasons so I had all the time I needed to feed my addiction.
After roughly eight months of that nonsense, I finally said enough is enough and decided to get a life, or a semblence of one anyway. Then I was introduced to EVE. Heh. Oh well, such is the life of a gamer.
~ Adder ~
Quick, Silent, Deadly
Nice article! I tried FarmVille for three days and just couldn't motivate myself to click on that app anymore. I never really understood why. I just chalked it up not my thing. After reading this article I finally understood why: daily play required. When I play an MMO I jus log in, play with friends, accomplish whatever strikes my fancy and log out. FarmVille requires me to log in constantly to reap the rewards of my previous game session whereas I can accomplish my "goal" in a single game session with MMOs.
I don't have anything against people who enjoy social gaming such as this. Just not my thing.
Keep up the articles, Jaime!
Great article Jaime. I dabbled in social games too on facebook, mainly because my friends invited me and I am always curious about things and like to try new stuff out. It didn't catch on with me though. I feel bad for those who get caught up and addicted to them.
One thing that wasn't mentioned and I think should be is that at least with the Zynga games, they do try to get you to spend money on each game. They are microtransactions, but I think an addicted gamer could end up spending lots of money on them if not careful.
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.