Facebook Games = Evidence of Doom of Western Civilization

The Game Room
1

I’m what they would call a video game addict. There’s a very large group that’s reckoned to purchase more than 20 games per year. Many of these games, understand, can consume whole weeks of time. (I wrote “addiction”, right?) Especially in the case of “god games” such as SimCity, this is partly on account of their intellectual difficulty.

Recently I’ve played Facebook games at the request of my sister, so that I can"be with the family". When compared to almost any of the top PC games over the last years, there is almost no intellectual challenge.

But even worse, and why I’m writing, is that even rather educated adults don’t seem to grasp the basic principles of, for example Zynga’s new hit CityVille.

Generally, the purpose of CityVille is to optimize limited resources of space and production. None of the people I’m playing with seem to readily grasp that: They place buildings and crops haphazardly in clumps, or along streets, apparently to look pretty. Or to optimize some particular, limited facet of the game. Even the most sophisticated player I know (who works for Zynga) grossly overbuilt … apparently trying to use every feature (or following the recommendations of “cheat” sites).

This seems like compelling evidence that these people can’t handle their home gardens, their closets, or pretty much organize any complicated scheduling in their lives.

What do these Facebook games tell us about the reasoning ability of the general populace?

2

Nothing.

They’re games. People are playing them for fun.

3

I don’t think they tell us anything. Plenty of people enter into a game like that with no intention of optimizing play, understanding the rules, managing assets well, etc. They’re perfectly happy to make things look pretty, or make sure to use every feature. Some of them will avoid particular features to make the game more challenging for themselves.

If you’ve ever designed games, one of the first lessons of humility you will learn is that people will not play your game the way you designed it or the way you tell them to.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it’s a fallacy to think that “intelligence of user” equates to “optimal use of game resources” in any way.

4

RealityChuck and dracoi,

They are playing for hours and hours, for days, and in competition. (Facebook games often show a running score of you vs. friends.) They have demanded to ask how I’m winning, and suggested that I’m paying Facebook to win. (There are options to buy extra points with real money.)

Leave aside the casual players. There seem to be practically NO players who are applying even rather simple optimization.

What I’m suggesting is that these games, played by millions, seem to be banal, even compared with Monopoly and solitaire.

5

While I agree that Facebook is slowly turning many of my more hermit friends into bigger hermits, and my politically minded friends on both sides of the fence into raving nutjobs, I always figured the games were just a passing phase. Indeed, I used to get lots of requests for Mafia Wars and Farmville back in the day, but most everyone wised up and saw these as a waste of time, not bothering to get involved in the spin-offs or new stuff that’s come out.

I agree that most people are playing the game just for fun and the ‘demands’ to know how you are winning are likely half in jest. The fact you are so focused on optimization makes me wonder if you might be the one missing the point. Pure optimization=intellect should also tell you that no one should be overweight, gamble, smoke, do drugs, or speed in their car either, but we do. If anything, the fact they didn’t read the rules just means they are a bit lazy, not that civilization is in decline.

6

Since there can be no factual answer to the OP, off to IMHO we go.

samclem MOderator

7

better zynga than gladiator fights, no?

8

I’m on level 60.

9

They’re probably just people who generally play single player rather than multiplayer, and/or dont have much experience in god games or the like.

Its less an issue of intelligence than experience and/or inclination. Most people arent that interested in studying in order to be competitive at a computer game and tend to view people who do as ‘overdoing it’.

Otara

10

I take major umbrage at your premise. Why would someone who is supposedly intellectual (which playing computer games well doesn’t even demonstrate, perhaps we could call you a self-styled intellectual) generalize the people they personally know with civilization as a whole? Did you never hear the old saw that anecdote is not the singular form of data? Do you think the US is the only civilized country in the world? How many people in the entire world don’t even have access to a computer, much less a computer game? Do you not realize that a Chinese person playing Go professionally (or Bobby Fisher re: chess) could easily spew the same illogical nonsense on your propensity to play the Sims as you say about people playing Zynga games?

Additionally, optimizing gameplay does not entail intellect, it merely entails sufficient motivation to copy and paste (as leagues of 15 year old hardcore WoW raiders copying everything they do from elitistjerks and tankspot can easily tell you). A machine can optimize gameplay while failing a turing test. What does this tell you?

There isn’t even a correlation going on here, much less causation. Drop the hubris and maybe we can have an intelligent conversation. Until then, you sound like just another bitter, anti-facebook shill.

11

It’s just a tiiiiiny bit difficult to know where to start responding. Yours would have to qualify as one of the most irrational, rambling posts I’ve read … in 1,000s of Straight Dope posts.

Millions of people are regularly playing games that require the same intellectual involvement as “Go Fish”. You know? There are absolute measurements here. CAT scans suggest that watching TV causes a similar amount of brain activity as being in a light sleep. I think Facebook is worse. I haven’t run CAT scans … so I’m asking here for impressions … before the studies are done … years from now … when it’s too late for millions of children.

The popular Facebook games that I’ve sampled are duller, after a few days, than almost any children’s board game. Mindless clicking hundreds of times to “plant crops”? Following a fixed menu of “challenges” where the whole “challenge” is to click a button that reads “Fight Now”?

This isn’t even like being asleep. You can at least think creatively while asleep. Facebook games are like being mentally incapacitated.

12

So don’t play.

It is, however, possible that your family and friends are braindead if they are accusing you of cheating rather than copying your winning strategies. But assuming that skill at a facebook game translates into intelligence is kind of stretching it, no?

13

you’re surprised why people aren’t taking an inane game seriously? do you also wonder why hamsters don’t put on better footwear for their time in the wheel?

14

I spend my real life optimizing my income, using my time and resources as efficiently as possible, trying to get the best reputation at work, etc. Then I come home and relax by playing (admittedly not facebook but) games like civ and sims. I play them however I want. I optimize for prettiness. I can’t see how that reflects on my intelligence unless that’s all I do for weeks on end.

If I choose to spend a nice summer afternoon lying on a blanket in the sun with my friends, my CAT scan probably would show me in a near coma state, but it would be pleasant and also have no implications for my general intelligence (unless I forgot sunscreen.)

15

How in the world do you expect to have an intellectual conversation about a topic when your premise is that people who disagree with you are stupid?

You seem to not grasp some fundamental concepts of gaming. The first is that it’s about having fun. Beating other people can be fun to some, but not to everyone. For many people, it’s just a chance to escape into a different reality temporarily.

Having a high score is very rarely the point of gaming. Sure, some people enjoy that sort of thing, and the advertisers at Facebook are willing to take advantage of it, but most people would rather not get into useless competitions.

Your premise is that, if people don’t have your priorities and serious towards gaming, they must be less intelligent. This premise is horribly flawed.

Oh, and rachellelogram’s post is perfectly logical: you just did the classic “video games are ruining our civilization” rant. She called you out on it. Even you admit that you have no logical reason to believe what you believe.

16

The object of a game is for the player to impose his or her mental world view on the system according to defined rules. Sometimes the player’s opponent is other players, sometimes it’s a computer AI player. Sometimes the player’s opponent is the game itself.

Games are designed to provide a specific set of circumstances, punishments and rewards. The game designers have a specific set out outcomes which they expect their systems and circumstances to produces.

But a game is not just a set of rules or outcomes which the designer wants. A game is only a game while it’s being played and the player forces it to adjust to his own set of expectations and outcomes. For gamers like you and me, the fun of a game is in taking the designer’s expectations and exceeding them - getting the highest score, the best city, the most wins, etc. But lots of gamers prefer to pursue their own expectations within the confines of the rule set rather than stick to the designer’s ideas.

This is called emergent gameplay and it’s increasingly a form of play that’s being encouraged in the best computer games. It can be as simple and obvious as setting up house rules for Monopoly or D&D. It can also be the focus of a game, like The Sims or Little Big Planet, where the game gives you tools and lets you do what you want with them. Sometimes it occurs when players discover a bug or glitch in the game and abuse it mercilessly.

Sometimes players just develop their own way of “scoring” the game so it provides meaning to them. My Mom plays Wow. She’s not into raiding or questing but she gets a big kick out of working the auction house and building a huge bank account. For her, the AH is the game. She’s not going by all the different methods Bliz has set up to rank players - but she’s not doing it wrong. She’s found a way to use the rule set of WoW to amuse herself. That’s solid win for her.

Complaining that people who play Cityville are focusing on making a pretty city is like complaining that people playing with legos make designs other than what’s on the box. Those city designers are using the rules set to implement their ideas of what a city should look like. It’s not important that their city doesn’t resemble the designer’s ideas or how a SimCity* vet would do it. What matters is that they set out a plan for their city and they’ve achieved it. Score one for them.

Most importantly, gamers who define their own win conditions are still gamers and not necessarily intellectually inferior to those who prefer to use the win conditions defined by the designers.

*And lets be honest here - SimCity is cool, but it’s hardly the pinnacle gaming expression.

17

Frontierville > CityVille

As Inner Stickler pointed out, if you don’t like them, just don’t play.

18

I think there’s something else going on. I think it’s more telling that you’ve decided that since someone isn’t very good at playing a game that they are therefore not very good at organizing their life. That you would even jump to this conclusion is a bit odd. It’s like saying “Well, Wogglebug always loses at Monoply, he’s probably terrible with money.”
OTOH, I’d be curious to see if there are any studies that show a correlation between cyber real estate management and closet organization. I’m going to guess it hasn’t been looked at and if it has, there’s no strong correlation.
Also, don’t forget, a lot of very smart people sort of let their brains turn to mush on facebook. It’s their place to wind down and forget about the stress of the day. Kind of like going to the bar…from home in front of the TV, with the kids running around.

19

@Merneith. Thanks for the “emergent gameplay” link; skimmed it and bookmarked it to have a closer look. I agree with your concept of “personal scoring”. It’s been noted in role playing / adventure games that there are different types of players, those who prefer: winning, puzzle solving, adventuring or socializing. (And what your mom does auctioning in World of Warcraft, my nephew does in DDO, and enjoys it very much.)

It’s that kind of creative activity I feel the Facebook games stifle. My challenge to anyone in the discussion who is an avid player of: chess, poker, SimCity, D&D, or first person shooters is to try three of the most popular Facebook games, and see how long you can stomach them. In fairness, there are people who enjoy mouse-clicking, as in FarmVille, a grid (literally) 500 times in 5 minutes, several times a day. But that seems like a compulsive disorder that could be directed toward cleaning house … or tending a real garden.

@Inner Stickler. There are studies showing, for example, that in gaming situation, poor children who do not have confidence in the future will take short term gains over long term ones. I have noticed a similar behavior in the children of poor friends. They have huge hoards of materials, but most especially, they keep cheap houses that are no longer cost-effective at the point in the game where they can be replaced. Do the Facebook games, oppositely, teach bad lessons about life? I’d argue they do in several ways. To take a simple example, FarmVille. Crops don’t grow in any realistic amount of time, are all cultivated the same way, all have 100% yield, all can be sold immediately, all can be replanted immediately.

@Idle Thoughts. The classic playground argument “If you don’t like it, just don’t play” ignores: 1) Friends, especially children, who otherwise would be playing games that I enjoy, are playing games that every adult in the family – including those who play – agrees are “stupid”. 2) The mindlessness is pervading our society: there is no other environment where millions of people log on every day to play. I don’t have an alternative. It’s Facebook or nothing, if I want to play with my remote children relatives.

  1. It also ignores the fact – which I think is more relevant than it first appears – that one of the biggest job opportunities I have is to work for Zynga. Programming trashy games, however, wouldn’t do much for my career. I.e., I can’t get away from Zynga’s influence. And neither, I think, can many other people in ways they don’t perceive. You might think, superficially – ignoring the larger issues – what possible difference does that guy’s career make to me? It makes a lot of difference. I would rather go back to NASA and do something that contributes to the future. Instead, I’m being coerced to contribute to marketing click-through campaigns to sell beauty products.

Several people have mentioned that they are just playing to have fun, that they enjoy, for example in city building games the cosmetic aspects. Actually I’m a big proponent of that. In CityVille, I have lots of open space (which is non-productive). But no one else I know plays that way. There are people, bless them, with the “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” philosophy. I’d argue that Facebook games bury that impulse: by making personal communication non-live, and mostly non-verbal; by keeping a running visible tally of the “worth” of moves on a minute-by-minute basis.

20

Facebook games are a different animal from what most people consider to be computer games. The first thing I’d recommend to the OP is get more friends. When you’ve got 50 neighbors at all different levels and playing styles you’ll get a much better feel for all the ways these games can be played.

As for Cityville (and what a stupid name) the game is new and I don’t think the developers even know what the eventual “goal” of the game will be. People I play with are already running out of space to expand, they’ve “optimized” their income, own all the most expensive stuff and now they’re just kinda twiddling their thumbs.