Topic
"Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville."
found interesting conversation and link to essay over on metafilter today:
www.metafilter.com/89936/Cl...
interested in people's take on the essay and discussion as it related to glitch.
hopefully this post is provocative enough to elicit such responses.
Replies
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Wow. I had been shrugging off this article, but itsa good one.
1 (free from obligation) and 3 (uncertain in outcome) are the biggest kickers for me, looking at the little of Glitch we've seen so far. I hope that Glitch strays FAR FAR from the farming rules of Farmville, where your failure tied to the timing of your crops, and you better have a calculator handy to figure out which is an optimum crop for your schedule.
I also want more chaos, and perhaps that will be found in the features that have only been hinted at, such as guilds, markets, political elections, group activities, etc. I wouldn't mind daily chores if I had a bigger picture of what I was playing (not working!) towards.
While Farmville's model is certainly tempting now, in the long run it's most likely going to fail as people get saturated with the kinds of rewards the games offer. And especially with the kind of crowd that MIGHT be attracted by Glitch (at least with who I see in the alpha!), I'd hope we'd be up for rewards that take longer to realize (e.g., I don't need to see a crop be harvested every 3 hours to stay excited, but I may like the problem of needing to let my field go fallow for a month to get better yields) and that are harder to conceptualize (e.g., I may want to give my crops away as part of some grand plan to take over the Spice Guild instead of selling them for 23c/bushel ). - I say you need to farm the farmville players into making reams of paper or whatnot... for the rest of the glitchers. Facebook can then be a factory that creates x number of items to be used daily in game.(or dropped randomly, ect)
- farming farmville players sounds slightly brilliant.
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Very good article, I was wondering why all the people around me took a second job in farming (especially those who never grew a flower in a pot even)
I don't see Glitch falling to this pitfall, especially because of its real social potential that we have just started seeing in GNE - i.e. multi-player interaction that is not limited to sending pre-defined gifts, but one that serves as a platform to allow users to create their own types of interactions (creating groups, guilds, conglomerates, governments, you name it). -
Thoughts from a Farmville player:
I like Farmville because the plots are like a little mosaic. I can plant crops of different colors and make my farm pretty. The plowing, planting, and harvesting I actually tend to find quite tedious, and often leave my farm unplanted for days at a time because of it; it's the open-endedness and opportunity for creativity that appeals to me. In my ideal Farmville, you'd be able to plant things and then just leave them there as long as you wanted.
Another Zynga game, Fishville, I find quite dull. All you do is buy fish, feed them, wait, and sell them. You can't control the arrangement or the movement of the fish, and you can only sort of decorate your tank. Also, if you don't feed your fish, they die, and then you feel like shit. I have enough /real/ things in life to feel like shit about, thanks. - Farmville for me: level 37=quit (1 more to go!), tho I may get mastery in all the crops and fertilize friends' crops beyond that.
- Recap of some interesting thoughts on Farmville from GDC 2010 ... www.designer-notes.com/?p=195
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"The Zynga guy said, you need to identify what people are doing most often in a game, because that’ll be the most fun activity. If that were true, the funnest activity in Starcraft is building Zerglings and the funnest in late-game Civ IV is clicking END TURN."
i wonder if the Zynga guy really put it that simply.
if so, and if that's a commonly held belief, it explains a large number of facebook games and why i dislike playing them. -
I don't know that I agree that the the tasks/responsibility/time management aspect of sims like Farmville are necessarily soul sucking drudgery, at least not for everyone. For me, it's only ok if it is in the service of an end point, end point being the end of a story arc vs. just leveling up. I wish sim games could be more chaptered, not only for a sense of accomplishment, but so I could maybe take a break between chapters.
The problem I have with all games like Farmville or even something like Animal Crossings is that the game essentially unspools in the same manner for everyone, even if I pick farming vs someone else picking alchemy for a job. What is missing for me in those games is a sense of individual destiny. I mean, if I had the chutzpah to play it that way, it would be cool to have the option to get a randomly selected destiny when I create my character. What a great test of one's game-playing zen if your fate had large chunks of your collections wiped periodically, just like playing alpha. Or if you are shot through with material luck but face some kind of grandiose challenge at some point. If I didn't want to deal with that kind of uncertainty, I could always create my character with worker bee mode instead. - I'm trying to convince a friend of mine to pick up Animal Crossing and leave Farmville behind. While Farmville may be more 'productive' in a shorter amount of time, I think AC is more...satisfying in the long run.
- I may be alone in this, but I don't like the way you are so reliant on others in Farmville. Why can't I raise a barn by myself, even if it takes longer or is more challenging? Instead, I have to ask for nails, or lumber - or whatever it is I keep getting requests for. If none is forthcoming, are you stuck barnless? Oh, the humanity.
- It's supposed to promote socialization, and ultimately, brainwash you into making your friends join.
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I tried Farmville (and several other Facebook apps with similar mechanics) and, well... I have a hard time refering to them as "games", to say the least. To me, they are more like fancy, graphical Microsoft Office spreadsheets: you click on some cell, you click on some other cell, and you wait for the computer to spit out the results (only it takes minutes or hours instead of a couple seconds to get your results). Rinse and repeat. Forever.
Leveling up doesn't seem to be but useless and pointless either, since no actual skill or interaction is required (just clicking and waiting), nor it makes your character better (in the best of cases, it might unlock some new items you didn't have access to before, but it feels artificial and, in any case, those items won't actually improve your game either, they'll just make it prettier in the best of cases). Levels are just petty scores to show off in front of your friends about how you have spent so much more time than them playing such game.
I tried most of these apps either out of curiousity or because friends were playing them as well, but I have given them all up pretty quickly, almost as soon as I've figured them out and found out that there's nothing more to them but to perform the same task again and again.
But mind you, despite the bashing against the waiting mechanics, I play and love quite a few games in which part of the game mechanics imply having to wait a certain amount of time in order to obtain some in-game effect or result (Pokemon or, just as Sweet Sadie mentioned, Animal Crossing) but, that's it, *as long as such game gives me something else to do in the meantime*.
Just my absolutely personal and subjective (albeit probably mildly inflamatory) two cents. Please don't be offended if you are an avid Farmville player. :(
P.S.: I'm from Spain and my English stinks at times, so please excuse me for any grammar and/or vocabulary mishaps. -
Well said, my friend.
Have you picked up the new Pokemon game? Thoroughly enjoyable. -
"I say you need to farm the farmville players into making reams of paper or whatnot... for the rest of the glitchers. Facebook can then be a factory that creates x number of items to be used daily in game.(or dropped randomly, ect)
Posted 14 days ago by Jaen Padryga ( permalink )
farming farmville players sounds slightly brilliant.
Posted 14 days ago by striatic ( permalink )"
This would work very well...until a farmer named Neo came along.