Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Rage Against the Machines

Anybody who grew up in America can tell you it’s a pretty violent country, and every consumer knows that our mass culture was reflecting that fact long before it began spewing the stuff in videogames. So on the surface, it seems strange that special powers should be attributed to games. What gives?  (...)

But if there is something dangerous about videogames now, it’s not the specter of players transforming into drooling sociopaths by enacting depraved fantasies. Instead of forensically dissecting the content packaged in games, we should look closely at the system of design and distribution that’s led them out of teen bedrooms and into the hands of a broader audience via computers and smartphones. It’s not Doom or Mortal Kombat or Death Race we should fear, in other words; it’s Candy Crush Saga, Angry Birds, and FarmVille.

To understand what is really distinctive about videogames, it helps to see how their operation runs like a racket: how the experience is designed to offer players a potentially toxic brew of guilty pleasure spiced with a kind of extortion and how they profit by stoking addiction. We might remember why we looked sideways at machine-enabled gaming in the first place—because it was a mode of play that seemed to normalize corrupt business practices in the guise of entertainment. Because the industry often seems like just another medium for swindlers. (...)

The new model of videogame delivery is “free-to-play” (F2P). At first it was limited to massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) like Neopets and MapleStory, which primarily relied on kids pestering their parents to fund their accounts so that they could buy in-game goods. These games always offer the first taste for free, and then ratchet up the attraction of paying for a more robust or customized gaming environment. In 2007, Facebook released a platform for developers to make free-to-play apps and games run within the social network’s ecosystem. Then came the iPhone, the Apple App Store, and all the copycats and spinoffs that it inspired. By 2010, free-to-play had become the norm for new games, particularly those being released for play online, via downloads, on social networks, or on smartphones—a category that is now quickly overtaking disc-based games. The point is to sell, sell, sell; the games give users opportunities to purchase virtual items or add-ons like clothing, hairstyles, or pets for their in-game characters.

In 2009, Facebook gaming startup darling Zynga launched a free-to-play game called FarmVille that went on to reach more than 80 million players. It offered a core experience for free, with add-ons and features available to those with enough “farm cash” scrip. Players can purchase farm cash through real-money transactions, earn it through gameplay accomplishments, or receive it as a reward for watching video ads or signing up for unrelated services that pay referral fees to game operators. Former Zynga CEO Mark Pincus sought out every possible method for increasing revenues. “I knew I needed revenues, right fucking now,” Pincus told attendees of a Berkeley startup mixer in 2009. “I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away.”

Every horrible thing in the book included designing a highly manipulative gameplay environment, much like the ones doled out by slot machines and coin-ops. FarmVille users had to either stop after they expended their in-game “energy” or pay up, in which case they could immediately continue. The in-game activities were designed so that they took much longer than any single play session could reasonably last, requiring players to return at prescheduled intervals to complete those tasks or else risk losing work they’d previously done—and possibly spent cash money to pursue. Players were prodded to spread notices and demands among their Facebook friends in exchange for items or favors that were otherwise inaccessible. As with slots and coin-ops, the occasional calculated anomaly in a free-to-play game doesn’t alter the overall results of the system, but only recharges the desire for another surprise, another epiphany; meanwhile, the expert player and the jackpot winner are exceptions that prove the rule.

FarmVille’s mimicry of the economically obsolete production unit of the family farm, in short, proved all too apt—like the hordes of small farmers sucked into tenantry and debt peonage during the first wave of industrialization in America, the freeholders on FarmVille’s vast virtual acreage soon learned that the game’s largely concealed infrastructure was where all the real fee-gouging action was occurring. Even those who kept their wallets tucked away in their pockets and purses would pay in other ways—by spreading “viral” invitations to recruit new farmers, for example. FarmVille users might have been having fun in the moment, but before long, they would look up to discover they owed their souls to the company store.

by Ian Bogost, Baffler |  Read more:
Image: Micael Duffy