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Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

The fundamental problem with Zynga products is that they're not games. The fact that they famously concentrate on "compulsion loops" and forming habits in their users tells you all you need to know. No real game has to focus on the compulsion to play - they just make the core game experience great so you come back. Not to mention that compulsion loops require user gratification, and there's only so much gratification you can squeeze out of harvesting digital goods.

The one notable exception is Poker. Poker is an actual game, and not shockingly it's the Zynga product with the most profitability and longevity.

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I wouldn't go that far. I would say a game like Diablo is basically just the same kind of "compulsion loop". Just done better. :)

> I would say a game like Diablo is basically just the same kind of "compulsion loop". Just done better. :)

Look no further than the extraordinary backlash against Diablo 3 to see the problem with that "compulsion loop" applied against modern gamers.

To be honest, I don't think the problem is necessarily with the compulsion loop itself (Diablo 2 had no such backlash). But when combined with a real-money "Paid Advantage" model, it creates a huge populist backlash against the game.

One difference with Diablo is that I can stop playing for a month and then come back to the game. Most of the social games are trying to encourage constant interaction, if you don't harvest your crops today they will die etc.

WoW was/ is somewhat like that, if you wanted to get the best gear/ achievements in the game you would have to play many hours daily to keep up with points, clear the top level raids etc.

That's why I never got into any of the Zynga games on FB -- they had the strong scent of Tamagotchi (now with extra spam!!!) about them, and I just can't see the faintest promise of pleasure in keeping a digital pet alive, no matter how they're painted. If that makes me weird, then I shall continue to be one with my weirdness.

Yeah, their definitely is a personality type out there they can target though. When younger I put a lot of time into WoW although I never played Zynga games past the initial novelty, nowhere near enough depth.

Now that I run my own businesses I am definitely after something I can pickup when I have a bit of time and not have it become a chore.

What, no casino analogy?

Zynga products are games. (Note: I'm 100% anti-Zynga, but I'm also something of an amateur game theorist. Thus, this will be a bit pedantic.) Zynga products are essentially casino games (which are also compulsion loops) but reinvented for social media. Zynga differs from the casino in two essential ways: (1) instead of being driven by thrill and desperate hope, the compulsion loop is built on peer pressure and sunk costs; (2) instead of being a consummate pseudo-elite luxury experience, it's a habit-forming and largely pointless chore.

Poker (Disclaimer: I have not played Zynga Poker; I'm inferring) doesn't succeed because it's somehow more of a "real game"; Poker succeeds because it's better crafted, largely by years of free play testing in the real world. While in other Zynga products, you're made to feel like you're building up to something, you aren't in Poker. This means that the "user gratification [being] squeezed" is effectively infinite: the false hope being offered is far more acceptable. Poker is older than the Internet.

If you plunge deep into the ivory tower of the games business, sure, you'll find that the term "game" is very hard to lock down properly. You'll probably even find a useful definition that manages to exclude Zynga products without excluding sensible games. But you'll also inevitably find it is full of problems anyways. In the larger picture, Zynga products are games. They're well-designed for the short-sightedness that they're meant for: making money for Zynga in the present: but as you say, that short-sightedness is likely to bite them in the end.

Casino games aren't really games either. They're all solved, when you play them you've already lost, and the best thing you can do (other than leave) is follow the program to lose the least (barring blackjack, which gives you something like a +0.1% with ideal play IIRC.) The only way to win a casino game is to stop playing. Casino games are "games" like lottery tickets and Candyland are "games," and far less than sports books or parimutuel race betting are.

Any definition of "game" that is inclusive of casino games can pretty much encompass any process that has steps that are done in turn. They are simply spaced doses of reward and punishment doled out by a random number generator.

Poker, like you said, is not a casino game. It can be made into a casino game, as long as you remove all opponents and rearrange the rules to make it a constantly losing proposition.

From an ethical viewpoint, what you're saying is true. Indeed, even from a mathematical viewpoint, what you're saying is true. But these are not the only valid viewpoints to look at games with.

What you're talking about is what distinguishes a good game from a bad game, an ethical game from an unethical game, an interesting game from an uninteresting game, and so on. You do not, in fact, distinguish a game from a not-game.

Would you call drinking games a kind of game? Dear Esther? Sim City? This is rhetorical; you probably wouldn't. But other people would, and there's no clear reason why they're wrong.

I'm not making a comment on ethics, just casino games. In fact, I see the ultimate goal of the people who create social games as to create a game with a clear goal, and a bit of a challenge to get there, and to immediately follow up that goal with another goal. Then you gradually make the goals harder and more attractive, and say if they pay or get a friend to join, they can get a little help. If you time it correctly, you can make it so that the only way that the player doesn't feel like they're drowning is when they're paying or bringing in new players in acceptable intervals, but you always pull them out of the water before they stop breathing and give them a cookie. It's a game, but I don't see it as ethical.

>distinguish a game from a not-game.

A not-game can be played without you. Your only choices are to watch and/or lose.

>Would you call drinking games a kind of game? Dear Esther? Sim City? This is rhetorical; you probably wouldn't. But other people would, and there's no clear reason why they're wrong.

Depends on what drinking game - if it's a drinking game in which there's only zero or one rational way to behave, it's just drinking, not a drinking game. Example: if it's a game where you pick a number, then roll a die, and if you roll the number you picked, you drink, no, it's not a game.

I know an awful lot of drinking games that are games. I can't recall one that isn't, other than the "watch X and when they say Y, drink" game. That's not a game. But it can easily be made a game by having each player choose a particular word.

I don't know what Dear Esther is.

Sim City is not a game, it's a simulation of a city. It's no more a game than building a model airplane or painting a landscape. Setting any particular goal within Sim City and achieving it is a game - just like the facebook stuff.

Casino games are completely different, though. The only object in a casino game is to gain money, and the rules reduce to: "Every 10 minutes, we will take a five dollar bill out of your pocket." They rely on a combination of the misguided common sense "law of averages" heuristic that people carry plus the illusion of control to create the dramatic rhythm that people expect from a game. They prey on an ignorance of statistics and primitive beliefs in magical qualities to keep them there. Not games. Victimization of average people by organized crime and cash-hungry governments more like it. If video poker is legal, I'm not sure why three-card monte isn't, other than it makes everything too obvious.

> A not-game can be played without you. Your only choices are to watch and/or lose.

This is acceptable as part of a constellation of definitions. Some people disagree that agency, rather than interactivity, is the defining attribute of a game. Some people disagree that victory conditions, achievable or not, are necessary. What makes your definition right, and theirs wrong?

But... this definition says that Tetris is not a game. It doesn't matter what you do in Tetris; you're just delaying the inevitable loss. How does your definition distinguish casino not-games from Tetris? (I am assuming, of course, that you consider Tetris to be a game.)

> Casino games are completely different, though.

This paragraph is an ethical (and possibly a legal) argument. Just because they're unethical does not make them not-games, unless you specifically include ethics in your definition. I fully agree that bad ethics are bad, but that's not the point. Ultimately, I have to quote you:

> It's a game, but I don't see it as ethical.

it's the Zynga product with the most profitability and longevity.

I'd be hesitant to quantify over the entire space of "Zynga product", because the average adult human produces 1 to 1.5 pounds of Zynga product per day.

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