<story><title>Who killed videogames?</title><url>http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>I have to wonder when this whole trend is going to come crashing to a halt. When, if ever, the social-gaming population will wake up one day and think, perhaps aloud, and perhaps at great volume, &quot;What the &lt;i&gt;fuck&lt;/i&gt; am I doing with my life? &lt;i&gt;Why&lt;/i&gt; do I need more virtual corn patches?&quot; And, perhaps, &quot;You know what? I&apos;m not accepting the Facebook invitation into little Mikey&apos;s mafia family. Fuck that noise. I&apos;m out.&quot;&lt;p&gt;By this, what I really mean is: when someone finally gets sick of Farmville, is he going to move on to the next Farmville, or is he burned out on the genre for good? Seems like there should be a &quot;fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me&quot; dynamic at work with players of these games. Which would mean that the genre is destined for oversaturation and burnout, and that there will be diminishing returns awaiting any marginal entrants into the field.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure the genre, as a whole, is still growing by leaps and bounds. But do we have any leading indicators about the playerbase? Such as their likelihood to be investing in more than one time-sinkey social game at a time? Or their likelihood to pick up another after quitting the first?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not wishing for the demise of the genre, but rather, am hoping that it&apos;ll hit a plateau from which it will be forced to innovate, experiment, and evolve. Seems to me that the cold, reductionist design philosophy of addiction-by-the-numbers should eventually dig its own grave in the form of mass player burnout on games produced as such. Then again, that&apos;s never happened with casinos. So this may be woefully naive thinking on my part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lucasjung</author><text>I had an experience similar to what you describe (waking up and thinking &quot;What the &lt;i&gt;fuck&lt;/i&gt; am I doing with my life?&quot;), but it predates these games.&lt;p&gt;I was in college (can&apos;t remember which year, probably my junior year) and my roommates and I were all hooked on Diablo II.  So were our friends across the hall.  We&apos;d often play together as a group on the LAN, but we also enjoyed playing independently.  We all played on headphones so as to not have the sounds of several simultaneous games clashing.&lt;p&gt;One afternoon, we were all playing simultaneously but independently.  I decided to take a break, paused my game, removed my headphones, and stood up.  Then I heard it: the sounds of rapid clicking coming from my roommates&apos; mouses (and the mouses of the guys across the hall--we usually kept our doors open).  I had decided to take a break right then because I had just leveled up, and that fact combined with the sound of the clicking gave me a moment of clarity: the whole game consisted of me clicking a mouse as fast as I could in order to make an arbitrary number (experience points) go up.  Everything else is just embellishment. The fundamentals are: you click the mouse, the number goes up.&lt;p&gt;I felt like one of those lab rats or monkeys that has two buttons: one that delivers a serving of food, and another that stimulates its pleasure centers.  They starve to death because they neglect the food button in favor of the pleasure button.  Except I was worse, in a way: I wasn&apos;t getting a jolt to my pleasure centers, I was just watching a meaningless number get higher.  Of course, I wasn&apos;t completely neglecting my well-being, either, but I was wasting a lot of time that could have been spent on more rewarding pursuits.&lt;p&gt;I uninstalled the game immediately and gave it away as fast as I could.  I didn&apos;t give up video games, because not all games are such complete wastes of time, but ever since then I have set the bar very high for any game I play (similar to the post by snprbob86 about strict selection criteria).  I&apos;m especially watchful for signs that a game is just an exercise in &quot;repeat simple task, increment arbitrary number.&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Who killed videogames?</title><url>http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jonnathanson</author><text>I have to wonder when this whole trend is going to come crashing to a halt. When, if ever, the social-gaming population will wake up one day and think, perhaps aloud, and perhaps at great volume, &quot;What the &lt;i&gt;fuck&lt;/i&gt; am I doing with my life? &lt;i&gt;Why&lt;/i&gt; do I need more virtual corn patches?&quot; And, perhaps, &quot;You know what? I&apos;m not accepting the Facebook invitation into little Mikey&apos;s mafia family. Fuck that noise. I&apos;m out.&quot;&lt;p&gt;By this, what I really mean is: when someone finally gets sick of Farmville, is he going to move on to the next Farmville, or is he burned out on the genre for good? Seems like there should be a &quot;fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me&quot; dynamic at work with players of these games. Which would mean that the genre is destined for oversaturation and burnout, and that there will be diminishing returns awaiting any marginal entrants into the field.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure the genre, as a whole, is still growing by leaps and bounds. But do we have any leading indicators about the playerbase? Such as their likelihood to be investing in more than one time-sinkey social game at a time? Or their likelihood to pick up another after quitting the first?&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not wishing for the demise of the genre, but rather, am hoping that it&apos;ll hit a plateau from which it will be forced to innovate, experiment, and evolve. Seems to me that the cold, reductionist design philosophy of addiction-by-the-numbers should eventually dig its own grave in the form of mass player burnout on games produced as such. Then again, that&apos;s never happened with casinos. So this may be woefully naive thinking on my part.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zipdog</author><text>If you look backwards, people have always been quite happy to enjoy fairly simple games with a mild social component. I`m thinking of card games, boules/boche, dominoes. Everywhere I`ve been I`ve seen people spending an afternoon playing these games with a few other people. So as long as onlne addictive games come close to that experience (which doesn`t really offer more than a pleasant time passing and a few jokes with others), they are not going to crash.</text></comment>