Games for Social Networks

Even if you are helping Haiti with charitable donations and trying to be good, it fundamentally remains the case that your business is built in part on stringing players along rather than delivering value to them.

As someone who worked a number of years on the development of online gambling games, I see Tadhg Kelly's point, and I completely agree on the increasing need for corporate social responsibility on the part of social games developers. On the other hand, this writing and the one about Zynga's strategy at Gamasutra earlier by the same author, display a puzzling, implicit expression of a hope that social games will turn into the game industry as we knew it - i.e. more engaging gameplay, more informed players, etc.

Once again, having experienced a number of projects where we tried to 'deepen' the 'gameplay' of online scratch tickets, for example, we found that majority of the players did not want it - it did not fit their mindset when coming to play these games that meant a short divergence from other tasks. Nothing more, nothing less.

I do not want to claim that there is no hypocrisy or conflicting interests between business and responsibility in the social games space - the offer case couple of months ago already testified for that. But still, there are people out there who simply enjoy and value routine simplicity when it comes to games as well, and for the majority, these games have a very particular, fleeting role in their lives - nothing more, nothing less - and they won't be providing Dr. Phil any headlines soon. Nevertheless, they want their dose of reward schedules and leveling ups with a sprinkle of gangsters, cute animals, farm crops, etc., and the social context of the network facilitates this for them in an engaging way - is that 'unethical' design? If not, where is the line drawn?

This brings to another point I find especially puzzling in the quoted piece, i.e. the implicit image of players as Pavlov's dogs without any control of their play behavior, just succumbing to the hooks of Zynga and the like, and not getting any value out of it. This rhetoric is also familiar to me from the gambling business: it was the rhetoric of the legislators and gatekeepers, who didn't understand a thing about contemporary segmentation methods based on motives, metrics, and customer-driven design methods, which are keys to responsible product development. It is a rhetoric that claims to talk about the rights of the players, i.e. about 'better' or more 'ethical' games, yet never mentions them in any other way than as a monolithic mass who is at the mercy of [insert genre or platform] games.

'Geez, if we could only design our games with more ethical principles but our players are too stupid for that.' It's too easy to fall into a trap where ethical design appears to rise from disinterest to your players' motives, how ever superficial they might seem to be, or actually, because of that - i.e. they do not meet one's high standards as designer so let's teach them what real game play is about.

Fail. Then you make it about you and your darling of a design, not about the wide variety of players and their wide variety of experiences, and the commitment levels to the products and services you are working with. Social game designers are here to create, yes, but also to serve - with a sense of business and responsibility.