Moderator Margaret Robertson explained at the outset of yesterday’s session at the GDC Social and Online Games Summit that the panel had considered if “it might be more accurate to exchange the word ‘legitimate’ for ‘evil’”, a nod to indie developer Jonathan Blow’s recent comments on the matter.
Ian Bogost of The Georgia Institute of Technology is a noted critic of social games, with his satirical social game Cow Clicker – “a Facebook game about Facebook games” – reflecting his feelings on the subject. To further illustrate his point he explains how high fructose corn syrup came to be so pervasive an ingredient in American foodstuffs.
A firm called ADM is the biggest supplier of corn-sweetener products, prompting Bogost to say: “Maybe Facebook is doing the same thing for friendship in the social games space. It’s turning people into resources, like ADM does for corn, and people become these resources that are changed into industrial value as efficiently as possible.”
While Bogost is social-sceptic from the outside looking in, Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings, is very much on the inside. With the firm’s Puzzle Pirates – a minigame-driven social MMOG – still enjoying success over seven years after launch, and the studio recently contracted by the BBC to develop a free-to-play Doctor Who MMOG for release later this year, one might expect his sentiment to be one of advocacy.
Yet he admits to reservations about the way social games get their hooks into players, as a free-to-play user is quickly, and greatly, monetised. “A lot of the mechanics around player psychology in social game design open up some very real ethical concerns, and push up against my comfort zone,” he says. “It’s up to all of us developers to make ethical decisions regarding our creative output.”
James goes on to compare social gamers to gambling addicts, arguing that the two are based on the same compulsion loops, which he considers unethical. “If you look at a row of people putting money into slot machines,” he says, “they’re not really smiling.”
The message had thusfar been that social games were not social, not fun, barely even games, and profoundly unethical. Nabeel Hyatt of social gaming king Zynga told of a 40-something Massachussets woman who regularly hosted Café World parties for her friends - essentially a social LAN party – which she said was evidence that social games “provide real social value and real happiness to [people’s] lives.”
Curt Bererton of ZipZapPlay agreed, saying that the transgenerational appeal of social games stimulated interaction between friends and family; that he talks about social games with people with whom he could never have discussed Grand Theft Auto or World Of Warcraft. “There’s significant social value there,” he says. “There is real social value in the interactions that are happening between large swathes of people.”
Yet he admits to the same ethical reservations, saying that development of Facebook title Baking Life was not focused on “thinking about evil ways to make our games addictive. We simply tried to make things more social.”
Bogost argues that just because social games are fun, and have social value, doesn’t mean they are the best way of having that fun, of seeing that value. “We’ve sort of allowed ourselves to be backed into a corner on these things,” he says. “I don’t want to accept it as the thing we were given and it’s what we’ve got, so we can’t ask questions anymore. To me, we have a sort of infrastructure that feels bad. It doesn’t feel like it’s advancing us as human beings.”