Re: A discussion of freemium games
Hi Ian.
thanks for pointing me in the direction of this one. Definitely some interesting thoughts although i don't exactly agree with all of it, in particular I personally am very suspicious at "evolutionary stories" of why people do what they do, sinse such things are ridiculously unfalsifyable. You don't need a long evolutionary idea to say why a Skinnner box is addictive or why random rewards in an operant conditioning setting are more addictive than frequent ones.
likewise, I am not %100 sure on the chap's aspects of good game design sinse if I think myself about why i personally play games, what games interest me and indeed why I have devoted a significant portion of my life to advocating for disabled game access i come up with a bit more than just "because it's vaguely adictive, gives random rewards and looks pretty"
Indeed it is pretty simple to tell "good" ie, what the chap would say are bennifici al games from "bad" games, ie the ones that use people as a resource and maximize addiction, sinse there has been some very unique work on addiction in context of desire theory and human wellbeing by philosophers like Robert Nozick and James Griffin.
The point of view I rather like here is the "second order desires" one, where Griffin notes that if a desire exists simply to be satisfied and has no further point on life then it probably exists just as an addiction, where as something done to satisfy some desire for a more direct quality which brings that quality into life generally is better for wellbeing.
For example, a person who drinks just for the sensation of being drunk is quite different from a person who drinks wine or wisky because they have a high easthetic appreciation of the process and sensations involved, gains knolidge on the subject even when not drinking, can converse about such with others and treats the process of drinking wine as an artistic appreciation of another individual (or another vinyard etc),'s work.
I'd see games in this light, as created object of artistic experience and as such I'd agree with the chap in the video on individual subjective experience, however I disagree that it's necessary to manipulate people to create a good and individualistic game, just that it's not necessary all good wines are sweet or all good music is in a major key.
For example, Swamp fails on several design points according to that schema. For one thing, it's rather difficult, harsh to newbies in terms of losing equipment, and while it does have progression of stats, the progression of stats no where negates the initial difficulty, that difficulty is only negated by becoming good at the game and training a person's reflexes. This doesn't stop it being a really awsome game which is justly popular.
for me, exploration plays a huge part in whether I bother with a g ame or not. if something like farm ville isn't going to give me any new text to read, locations to explore new challenges with enemies, well why wwould I bother playing? Indeed I've lost patients with a lot of online Browser mmorpgs for precisely this reason.
"exploration" is a very different thing to progression and actually somethinyg the chap didn't mention in the video.
Either way, thanks for sharing, interesting thing to watch especially because it made me think, which i always appreciate.
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