It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear.
Like Skynet, the fictional self aware network from Terminator 2, social games and the new wave of companies making them are learning at a geometric rate. What we are seeing with social games is games as a business first, trying and testing and refining and exploiting different genres at phenomenal speed with no regard for traditional hangups and legacy cliches of the traditional games industry. Often because they don't know very much about the traditional videogame industry. They have no problem with providing exactly what is wanted by the audience, regardless of how it's perceived by 'gamers'.
In the process, social game makers have struck oil and brought into the public eye huge audiences who like playing games but aren't traditional gamers. These people are paying lots of money to these companies! In what seems the very definition of consenting adult behaviour, these companies are facilitating the easy transfer of money from these people in exchange for things they want - or at least as easy as possible while bending to the will of the lunch money demanding Facebook and their credit system.
 |
| The internet before people went there. |
One indie game designer/maker wrote fairly recently that they don't make games to monetise the bored, referring instead to some higher ideal (something about fun, ownership, maybe love). A romantic notion, but also almost word for word what all game makers do: monetise bored people. Of course what they meant was their games are better, less mediocre than banal and cynical than freemium crap. Depending on how you measure 'better' then sure, but what is the point attempting to be made here? The Wire might be 'better' than The X Factor and The Fat Duck might be 'better' than KFC. They are different products that co-exist within the same industry.
The urge amongst gamers to dictate what is okay to be seen enjoying isn't unique to gaming but it does seem to be especially prevalent. Gamers and game makers offhandedly dismiss social/casual games as 'Skinner boxes' and feel compelled to tell people they are wrong for playing or liking games like Tiny Tower. "They are pointless." they say. "A waste of time.", "Barely even a game." Gamers are so used to living by arbitrary conventions rather than questioning them that they've created a set of complicated rules around their hobby. If you don't know the secret handshake then you can't come in. David Sirlin labels people who play by these sorts of self inflicted rules in fighting games as 'scrubs'.
Maybe his visual acuity is based on movement.
While traditional game makers are wondering what all of it means for them and whether or not the bad men will force him to put some horrible things in his game, something is happening. Social casual gaming is getting closer to traditional gaming, but only where it makes sense to. It will inevitably get closer, but only where it makes sense to. The worry for traditional game makers isn't that the current wave of social games are stealing their audience. Their worry should be that if social gaming companies start encroaching on 'real' games territory, how much they'll decide is worth taking.
On the hating of polarised opinion from Indie devs:
ReplyDeleteI'd say the Indie devs should be as emo as they want about their work. It's deeply personal shit to them, no? So they should kick off and rail against the popularist mainstream of Social Games.
Why? Because the key argument against social gaming is that it only innovates in terms of the context of deployment, the monetisation of social and individual objectives and methods of socialising game formats, but social gaming does relatively little in the more abstract area of interactive game design.
This is directly opposed to the modern Indie Games ideology, which is to monetise 'creatively free' game design through a faith in the nobilty of the art, or the idea that such work should be rewarded for the sake of continuing the noble struggle for progess.
Of course it's a running joke that Indie Games amount to little more than stupidly hard 2D platformers, but that's not quite the case in a post-Minecraft world. And no doubt, Zynga Lab 245 is probably trying to socially-monetise open-world lego sets right now.
I also think the diametric opposition is a bit artifical, as fueled by nuff blogs and articles from raging devs or whatnot, which has hived off the indie Flash scene from the Facebook one.
I don't think there's too big a barrier to entry for an indie Flash dude to create his own socially-oriented game in principle, but in practice, you're fucked unless you can scale-up to allow player counts in the tens of millions, which costs nuff hosting money to attempt, yet alone run successfully and sustainably.
So yeah, the issue with social gaming is that there's no way for an indie dev to get a foothold, which probably drives that hatred. For trad console, there's nuff routes available with a touch of investment - XBL Indie Games, PS Minis, Smartphone etc - and even dodgier avenues like R4 cards for DS and Homebrew hax for the Wii - are all within reach of tiny teams.
So a suitably dedicated Indie dev can start on paths to pro-level on just about any platform other than social. So they should be allowed to rage, I think, but only if it increases emphasis on design innovation for thier own field, rather than toys-out-the-pram footstomping that it's 'not fair' or whatevs that raw commerical demand should determine wild-scale game design.
Like you say, Stiff, it's dumb to insist it's wrong just because the guiding principles are oppositional, but at the same time, let 'em fight!
(TBH, I wouldn't be surprised if the big social games companies end up providing routes to indie devs to deploy wilder and more experimental social titles within the next five years, as a means of nuturing innovation in social game design once the existing templates become stale.)
Tont, this is a long comment, and it's going to take time to reply to every point you make individually - and to determine which are questions and which are statements. But thanks for making the effort to post your thoughts. In reply to your last point - not strictly a social gaming company, but notice that Rovio has just announced an indie publishing arm/helping clear a path to market.
ReplyDeleteIf you look also at Zynga's acquisitions, it points in that exact direction. I think that social gaming companies who are really attacking the industry from the strictly business angle will have to find and learn to exploit new genres much more quickly than that. I expect we'll also see some sort of persistant character system that works over different games, enabling players to invest time into any given title and not have to start all over again when they get bored of that game.
Zynga's acquisitions can be seen as ways to add tangible value to the company. I'm sure there's some creative worth coming from the smaller studios Zynga's bought up, though.
ReplyDeleteBut yah, that Rovio announcement arrived in a pretty timely manner innit. Nice to see that kind of support (even if it smacks a bit of getting a gateholder place inbetween indie devs and the digital/smartphone platforms, but that's just me being cynical).