Games for Change 2012, thoughts

This is from last year but it pretty much looked the same

A friend of a friend said the atmosphere was "masturbatory." I think that's about 50% accurate. Not much criticism goes on here, everyone just pumps each other up about their ventures and start-ups and whatnot. (I'm guilty of perpetuating this culture too; my "gay rant" consisted more or less of patting everyone on the back.)

But is there anything wrong with masturbation? It feels great, it doesn't hurt anyone, they should do what they enjoy -- so yeah, mixed feelings here.

I watched one presentation by the Tate, where basically they had a bunch of money and wanted to make games inspired by Alice in Wonderland -- and in a breathtaking squandering of opportunity and resources, they chose to reskin a pipe dream game / a matching cards memory game -- followed by some patronizing videos of mouth-breathing adults talking about how you used the memory in your brain to memorize cards.

And all around the auditorium, with my eyes like dinner plates, I saw people eagerly taking notes and celebrating this as something other than a profound lack of imagination that utterly betrays its subject material.

One feels almost as if G4C could use a bit of the drama that engulfs GDC / IGF each year.

Can you find the fine line between a reward that encourages players to have fun and an incentive that enslaves them?

Then you should be a "Player Investment Designer," possibly the most evil-sounding game job ever? (via @witnessgame) Let's enslave all our players!

Pity the First Horseman

http://gamification.org/wiki/Game_Design

"Competition is the basis for most of humanity's progress and evolution."

Unfortunately, the documentation's rife with errors: "Engagement Curve" should be re-labeled as "How to Interfere With The Player's Daily Life and Make Them Worry About Monetizing Their Friends Frequently Enough to Collect Enough Virtual Points to Buy a Re-Colored 128x128 PNG of a Kitten."

Or maybe it's one of traditional gaming's double agents operating in the field, deliberately planting false information like this gem -- "Playtesting in traditional gaming happens very early in the design process" (Wrong. Playtesting in a digital context happens at an intermediate stage, when you finally have a working prototype to actually playtest).

... Okay, I have a penchant for exaggeration when clearly just one foolish individual wrote all this, and most of it is "blah blah blah" but some of it is downright absurd. We're probably falling into that "first we'll make fun of them, then we'll fight them, then they'll win" trap, but hey, we might as well enjoy ourselves before we're competing for NikePoints(TM) by kicking each other in the groin repeatedly.

(hat tip to Andrew Weldon's Facebook profile.)

Preaching to the Converted

Some words from Jonathan Blow: (emphasis mine)

... I still wouldn't tell people, "Don't make that game" exactly, I would say, "Think about what you're making and be careful when you make it and try not to exploit players." But I mean now that we've got FarmVille and stuff like that, I pretty much would say "don't make that kind of game" because I don't see much value in it.

It's only about exploiting the players and yes, people report having fun with that kind of game. You know, certain kinds of hardcore game players don't find much interest in FarmVille, but a certain large segment of the population does. But then when you look at the design process in that game, it's not about designing a fun game. It's not about designing something that's going to be interesting or a positive experience in any way -- it's actually about designing something that's a negative experience.

It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game. Which previous genres of game never did. And it's about, "How do we get players to exploit their friends in a mechanical way in order to progress?" And in that or exploiting their friends, they kind of turn them in to us and then we can monetize their relationships. And that's all those games are, basically.

And there's this kind of new way where people are, like Bryan Reynolds working on FrontierVille and stuff, making it supposedly deeper, but that kind of thing has been very token so far. And in fact, I would argue that the audience of that kind of game doesn't necessarily want a deeper game, or certainly that's not proven; it's very speculative.

So I would say don't make that stuff. If you want to make a Facebook game, there are a lot of very creative things that could be done, but the FarmVille template is not the right one...

(... And then you have people calling you a classist for insisting that the reward scheduling in Farmville is unhealthy and exploitative -- because crack addicts have been known to defend their habits.)