Anyone who takes enjoyment from exploiting their friends in the furtherance of a glorified spreadsheet needs a hug, a trip to the ice cream parlor, and a meatspace game of Uno.

There may be a baseline pseudo-fun available in the current crop of social games. Most social games, though, are more interested in bare metal compulsion than truly meritorious, universally recognizable fun.

You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?

There's pandering to flyover country and then there's making something good. One will get you Oprah and Zynga. The other gets you Inception and Mad Men. One is quick cash, the other is integrity.

I'd rather take a smaller payday from people I like and respect than make crap.

> You're really willing to sit there and tell me that you're comfortable with social game evolution stopping right now? This stuff really is sufficiently fun for you?

You seem to have a great vision for what social games could be. I cannot urge this enough - please go build that vision now. The industry needs innovation badly. There are huge profits to the person who can pull this off, and I hope that person is you.

But my message is this - Build Stuff People Want. Many people have fallen into this trap, myself included. I thought I could buck the trend, out-innovate Zynga, and make a truly fun game. But in the end I failed because I spent too much time in an ivory tower making the perfect game, and no time making an enjoyable product.

A great analogy is engineering brilliant software, but failing to build something people want to buy.

Inception was a success because Christopher Nolan is able to carefully balance the things that make a great movie with the things that make great ticket sales. It wasn't the best movie ever, and it wasn't the best selling movie ever. But a careful blend of both lead to success.

No one in social games today can do this. I want that to change.

To think that one can simply "made something good" is a fallacious line of thinking along the lines of "build it, and they will come". Fundamental understanding of what your audience wants is so critical.

I'm not saying Zynga makes good games. I'm not saying you should follow in Zynga's footsteps. I'm saying you need to understand what Zynga does right if you want to beat them. And if you think all Zynga does is "be evil" and "buy ads", you haven't been paying close enough attention.

All of this thread about whether or not social games are fun is such an oversimplification as to be worthless.

First off, there's the semantics. What is a social game? Is it something running in Facebook? If so, you're not going to see it evolve too much too soon. That's because of the way the platform incentives are structured, the mindset of the average person who is on Facebook at the moment (more often than not at work, multitasking, able to devote only infrequent, short bursts of attention) and the inherent technical limitations of the Flash platform. If you ever saw the traffic graphs of a successful game, you'd understand immediately why casual is winning. It has a high bounce rate and peaks on weekday mornings.

If you define "social gaming" more broadly, which I think you should, then World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and many other very innovative games are social games. In that case you're already seeing social games evolve. My little cousins play Call of Duty over Xbox live with each other from their homes 50 miles apart every day. That's social gaming if you ask me, and they at least think it's fun.

There's certainly no accounting for taste. It's just plain snobbish to say the games you like are "universally recognized as fun" and the games you don't like aren't. I'd rather jam a ballpoint pen into my eye than play an asynchronous game of Scrabble. You'd sooner catch me playing Farmville.

What a nice barrel of straw men you have there. I love the bonfire you've constructed for them!

For the purposes of a thread about Zynga, it's reasonable to assume a social game in this context is, indeed, a Facebook-flavored game.

Realtime multiplayer has enjoyed a lot of evolution since you had to bind curses and status reports to your F-keys in Quake. Definitely share your enthusiasm for where it is going right now.

Asynch casual multiplayer is in a dreadful rut. The big beef I have with it is that so little of it is skill based that you can't enjoy improvement over time, except with more and more swipes of the credit card (edit: or pointless grinding). I don't think the games I like are universally recognized as fun. What I said, if you'll read my post, is that asynch casual games are relying more on ill-concealed compulsion loops than on anything an observer would look at and think "boy, that looks fun to play."

Until asynch casual multiplayer, as your semantic nitpicking requires I call it, leverages gameplay that lets players feel themselves grow more skilled, we're just not talking about anything of lasting value. Personal growth is a huge component of enjoyable gameplay and you can't just add a row to a spreadsheet game to simulate that.

Bejeweled

It's social, casual, skill based, and fun.

To answer a likely question, it's social be use I want to beat my friends scores each week

So is Farmville. One of the biggest motivators in those sorts of games is the comparison bar at the bottom that shows your level and that of your friends. Notice that is in every Flash map-based game on Facebook.

but I don't consider farmville gameplay fun which I think the previous commenters were also implying.

Again, you're applying your definition of fun. Your definition is something that allows you to grow in skill. I certainly enjoy that.

Scott Adams wrote a very good article about the illusion of skill this week. Skill is mostly the result of a compulsion loop. I play Scrabble, I improve, so I play more Scrabble. It's not much different than harvest crop, get money, build another crop.

If I play Scrabble more than you, I will probably beat you when you and I play Scrabble. If I play Farmville more than you, I will have a bigger and better farm. Both of those are generalities (it is of course quite possible to play both games sub-optimally, though easier with the former).

Also that's not the only thing anyone considers fun. A lot of people look at a virtual farm full of crops and chickens and barns and think "boy that looks fun to play". Millions. There's more to it than compulsion loops, they don't keep players around for very long.

Nice one, jshen. Definitely buy that example. Much more fun than Farmville, too.

It could use more depth but match three as a game style has some compelling play.

Obviously it's not about "exploiting their friends". You can block Farmville or Mafia Wars if you don't want to see updates about them. There's a cooperative element that a lot of people enjoy there; they enjoy bartering with friends for items and sharing the wealth when they have it.

Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.

It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.

But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.

>> but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it. <<

Except in the article it read:

"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."

I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.

@teej

Very thought provoking. What a great conversation.

I wish I had a clearer vision on the next step for social games. I honestly do. Sadly I think it'll be a long, iterative process before that industry sorts out exactly how to make a genuinely compelling experience that fits into the very real confines and perceptions you described. Bits and pieces will shake out as true fun but it'll take time to see it cobbled together into a comprehensively non-crappy game.

My lack of imagination doesn't stop me thinking there's a better way, though.

It sounds like you really took a whack at this. I hope you find a way to do something with everything you learned. It's a tough problem that can touch a lot of people.

It's not that no one knows how to make a truly magnificent social game. In fact there are many people who know exactly how to do it.

Right now the marketplace is too young to appreciate quality. The masterpieces are overlooked and the winners are whichever games are the loudest and most accessible.

That's how it will be until the public as a whole gets more experience in this area and develops a certain level of taste.

There was no equivalent to HBO or Mad Men back when TV was new. It took a long time for quality shows to make money - and even now The Wire was considered only a modest financial success.

Great art often makes no money. The better an artist you are, the more likely you are to die before your works are appreciated.

This is a really great point. I hadn't considered the maturity of the market. I look forward to seeing it grow up as people's expectations increase.

@mattdeboard

As a sincere answer... not really. All it makes me is better for me. And people who have a concurring viewpoint are also better for me inasmuch as we have shared values and my idealism (my self-righteousness?) makes values important to me.

Sincere question: Does that make you better than those who enjoy the "quick cash" entertainment? FWIW I think the answer to that is affirmative, but then I'm a walking example of confirmation bias on this topic.

Can we stop using the phrase "flyover country?" I and many others find it offensive. (Unless you're using it ironically, in which case, carry on, but I don't think you are.) Middle-aged women in boring desk jobs aren't that different in the center of the country from anywhere else. There are a lot of smart people and cool things to see there too.

I totally agree, I find it very condescending, and I'm not in what one generally considers flyover country.

I'm in Seattle, I guess you would fly over here if you were going from Boise, ID to Forks, WA.

I don't know. The guy has like 600 karma here. Clearly he is more capable of judging what is fun and what is not than the 80 million Farmville players.