My friend recommend me this article, and after reading it, I find myself split in the middle regarding the "Zynga Abyss".
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-zynga-abyss/251920/
Yes, Farmville is designed to get player spend hours doing virtual crops, spamming friends, planning resources, decorating farms. Many "hardcore" gamer would consider that waste of time or stupid. But you know what I think is really stupid? Playing Ninja Gaiden, get defeated/killed by the lowest enemies every other minute and try again and again and again... Yet as hard as it is, I've seen people speak of this game with great pride, no less than winning a Nobel Price, about how he finished it at the hardest level. I'm sure that's what the designer had in mind about "hard fun", that you spend days even months of your life mastering your skill of killing monsters in one particular game which you'll never use in any other circumstances. But truth to be told, if I have a choice between Farmville and Ninja Gaiden, I'll pick Farmville in a heart beat.
The article used another game as a comparison of what's a good fun, compare to Farmvilles' "coercive and unethical fun". A simple game that let you run the course of obstacles for as long as you can. But I really don't like this kind of game, Tetrix, Pacman... because you'll never win. No matter how good you are, there's no winning. You always end up losing/dying. You can argue that the reward is you get a bit further with practice, but still in my opinion, the game doesn't reward you for trying. Just when you think you get better at it, the game present you with a more difficult challenge and you failed again. Maybe the Ninja Gaiden Hardcore people would find this challange/fail model fun, not me.
One thing I often seen in "hardcore" game designer is that they tent to have this "this fun is better than that fun" thinking. If we can accept TV shows such as Jersey Shore co-existing with Mad Men or Rome, why do we feel the need to "educate" our players what is real fun, and what is "evil company stealing your money fun"? We're not talking about coerce candy out of little kids here, for the most part, facebook gamers are grow men who can (gasp!) be responsible for their own action, money and how to spend their life. If someone enjoy spending hours of time and tons of money on virtual crop, who am I to say "you don't really enjoy it, you just feel compelled to do it because the game is designed as such". A entire city is designed based on this concept, yet we all go there and have a good time. Programs and rehab facility is built to help people get out of playing "coercion" games, yet we blame the people not the game itself.
So why, as game designers, we feel the need to "purify" our product into such moral standard? Why can't we just let people have their fun, believing that they're smart enough to make their own choices, and if they want to "waste" their life away, it's not our responsibility to stop them.
I considered myself a "hardcore" gamer, although I don't like to use that word. It's such an obnoxious and exclusive word. Indeed, I also feel that most facebook games are shallow and viral focused. They don't offer a good fulfilling story, not much game play to speak of, and rely too much on spamming your friends. But that's just personal taste. A game with better story, deep game play, rely less on spamming would be nice to have, but that doesn't mean it's more "moral" than Zynga games.
After all, at the end of the day, Zynga or any other game studio, is a company whose primary function is to profit. If a game generate millions of user and financially successful, the game should be considered a good game, which deserve our respect.
0 comments:
Post a Comment