Dragon Clickers

Fine, I’ll post something.  I guess it might as well have something to do with the Zynga stuff below, even though that post is ancient now.

So, Facebook games.  As I mentioned in the comments I am now reading yet don’t remember writing below, I’m “That Guy Who Isn’t On Facebook”.  There are various reasons why.  It’s not quite entirely old mannish reactionary iconoclasm, but there are probably elements of that.  In any case, the only thing that had me tempted to sign up is when I found out that Sid Meier was working on a Civilization game for it.  But by the time it arrived I kind of didn’t care anymore and it appears that neither did anyone else so that’s that.

I did end up on Google+, though.  Why?  Basically because I already had a Google profile and use iGoogle and Gmail and Google Reader and Google Documents and Google basically owns my soul at this point and I’ll be the first against the wall when Google Skynet achieves sentience.  I have no friends, though, so there isn’t much activity on it.  But, a propos to this blog, it has games now!  I finally get to see what everyone’s been talking about.  Specifically, I tried the Dragon Age one and something called Edgeworld.

Yeah, so these games are garbage.

Dragon Age Legends especially.  DAL is a game where you click on an icon to start a fight.  During a fight, you click on a dude to hit them.  Or you can click one of many different abilities to hit them a bit harder than normal.  After you’ve clicked for a while, the game tells you you aren’t allowed to click anymore for now.  Of course, you have the option of paying money or spamming your friends in order to get the right to click a bit more.  I was playing more interesting flash games on Newgrounds a decade ago.

There’s not even like any story to go along with this, or at least not much in the week or two I’ve tried this.  And there’s pretty much nothing to this game but little flash animations and text so it’s not like it would be hard to add a bunch of crappy generic fantasy crap to smooth things over between clicking sessions.  It looked kind of like this would be the case to begin with?  But it never went anywhere.  It was just “walk down this road and kill monsters.  Now you’re in the new zone!  Kill more monsters.”

Edgeworld is less offensive.  It’s basically your Ikarium clone only with a tower defense element.  It’s still super slow and boring and ultimately meaningless and vaguely disquieting to the soul, but at least there’s a there there.

Anyway, all I heard when this Dragon Age thing came out was that it was the game that proved that Facebook games can be worth playing.  It advertises itself on its official webpage as “the first real game on Facebook.”  After seeing how utterly banal it actually is, ugh.  I dare not even look at whatever Cityfarmtown is for fear of losing hope for the youth of today.  I may sound a little hyperbolic about this, but I really did start to get offended at some point.

It’s like this: when someone makes a game and puts it in a box and tries to sell it to me for 60 bucks, there’s sort of an implicit contract negotiation going on.  On the one hand, I’m expecting the game maker to be pouring their heart and soul into making the best darned game there can be, and I’ll reward them with my 60 dollars.  On the other hand, they kind of just want my 60 dollars and will do basically the minimum required effort to get it.  So in this situation, they kind of have two ways to get my money: make a game good enough that I’ll have no qualms paying them, or they can make an OK or bad game and trick me into buying it via marketing and such.

The latter happens occasionally, of course, but really the former is the most sustainable approach in the long run and that’s generally how companies behave, successfully or no.  When I try one of these “social” games, however, I feel like I am not a customer but a natural resource, and the game makers are not trying to sell something to me but trying to extract something from me.  Namely, cash, or advertising via “sharing” (and everyone learned in kindergarten that sharing is awesome so why wouldn’t you do it?)  They give you a bunch of things to click on, and dribble out little dings, in such a blatant attempt to drill that Pavlovian association in your brain that releases endorphins when you click and it goes ding, and then you want to give it money so that you can click it more often because then maybe it will ding again.

I sat there clicking on the 100th monster on Dragon Age Legends, and then it dropped enough cash for me to build a storehouse in my castle, and I realized what it felt like to be that guy sitting all day long in front of the convenience store video poker machine.

The incentives of a game maker to make a “good” game versus an “addictive” game change based on the business model in place.  It’s kind of an interesting topic these days, what with all of these social games taking off (though by now, possibly sputtering out) but also with the rise of “Free to play” games.  The past year or so I’ve actually dabbled quite a bit in “F2P”, which largely fall into the same soul-sucking trap described above, but there are some notable exceptions I’ve been quite happy with.  I’ll go into those later.