My main disagreements with Jesse Schell’s lecture:
- Right now external rewards are an ‘ooh shiny’ within culture. We have struck some gold with the vein of behavioral psychology, and now everyone is rushing in believe there is gold enough for eternity in there somewhere. The mind is being cracked open like some blue ocean market. If there’s anything we know about these things it’s that they saturate. With each further achievement system that latches on to our daily lives, the rewards become less and less novel. After enough of them, the benefits will settle down into the background noise of our daily motivations. Like any drug, the brain develops a tolerance. Assuming his dystopian vision comes to pass, those reward system will be background noise – expected within any new system or promotion, but not a bullet point feature. When opening up a new airline company, saying that you have offer frequent flier miles isn’t going to turn any heads. We’ve dealt with reward structures that have turned background before, and like other drugs, there will need to be an escalation to get any attention.
- The escalation won’t be more of the same. Eventually while spelunking in the brain, something new will come along – another ‘ooh shiny’ that will no doubt be the topic of some future ominous keynote. If anything, external reward schemes aren’t the future, they’re the emerging present. If we put all our best minds on sapping this gold vein for all its worth, no one will ever find that minerals like uranium might have their value.
- Many good game designers ARE working on the problem right now and to say that they aren’t present in the field is a bit insulting. What’s important is that we push the discourse in the direction that benefits both games AND society as a whole. We as game designers have the power to prevent this rat-and-pellet scenario by pushing the persuasive envelope in the right direction. There will be no shortage of marketers cum game designers willing to tweak the spreadsheet pivot a bit more.
- Reward structures are only ONE of the many neural motivators for gaming, and while the most basic and exploitable with our current understanding, they do not represent the true power of games. If anything we’ve learned from the last decade or two of ludology it’s that games and learning are inexplicably linked – creating reward mechanisms that are devoid of learning and the introduction of new elements seems backwards. In the old ‘depth and breadth’ game design metric, achievement systems for brushing your teeth have neither – the entire ruleset is one item long and mastery is immediate. Sure the ‘game’ is in taking advantage of the system as a whole, not just the teeth part, but without learning and mastery how soon will it get stale? Most facebook games lose my interest after a short while for this reason – I feel I’ve learned everything there is to learn and the rest is just rote repetition. We’ve fought to elevate this (to some notable successes) within the Free to play and MMO arenas. Why does he think our future is to give up these efforts and succumb to age old formulas?
I have a lot of respect for Mr. Schell, but I can’t see this one as much more than fear mongering – stirring the pot. Based on the amount of ‘check this out’ and ‘awesome video’ tweets and the general lack of criticism, I can’t say he’s succeeded. In summing up, I think the trend is exactly as he put it – but this is a short term trend (really just the last two years) in a long term history of games. Remember with Full Motion Video was the future of games? Virtual Reality? Hyperbole is dangerous, but the exercise of it for sake of argument is good in that it gets people thinking. Just because the current trend is moving in this one direction does not invalidate all other work and studies that have come before regarding future predictions.
I also responded to his lecture though I pull from social theory as opposed to psychology, i’d imagine most anyone who saw it is going to think about it on their own terms as well. I have some issues with 4.
You seem to be making an anecdotal argument on facebook games. Personal relativism when projected to the entire population of people who A). aren’t like you and B). Don’t know how to use a computer, let alone make a game, don’t know this and C). are enthralled by a game, should be of huge interest to game designers.
Schell’s big unsaid point remains to really be said, people who aren’t gamers are buying retarded things from games that game designers could care less about. And they’re doing it in droves. Like most new markets, it will over-saturate, crash, and even out. Where it ends up will be worth noting even if game makers refuse to learn anything from it. Right now game makers as a whole seem to be arguing some sort of illegitimate legitimacy vs remaining on the periphery of societal consciousness as they are right now. Schell is one side, the side that acknowledges the facebook dilemma, who will offer a well thought out counterpoint?
That too, will be fun to watch.
Good thoughts all around. I’m undecided whether this trend is a fad that will fade away. Jesse does mention the popularity of Facebook games and XBox live achievements. People REALLY do like their achievements and most of them are completely trivial, but people still work hard to get them for whatever reason. Both you and I aren’t interested in gameplay that lacks depth but many millions of people do. It’s not us we have to be looking out for, but the people who are easily manipulated by unethical marketing-game designers.
I can’t stand advertisements on TV. They don’t work for me. But they must work for millions of others, otherwise they’re wouldn’t be advertisements.
Nick: I’m not arguing that gaming needs that depth… The point I was making is that the huge ‘quasi-gaming’/funware/pervasive gaming system is going to exist just fine: instead of landsliding game development into this (which he seems to be arguing for: this is where the market is going so hop on), I agree more with Jane McGonigal’s view that game designers are going to be agents of social change. We should use these systems to find ways of uplifting society – much the way that Web 2.0 startups are taking advantage of the social tide to solve problems one at a time.
The more me-too-ism we apply to on this particular set of point based mechanics, the more watered down the experience becomes. I think more people may begin to ask:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/are_modern_web_apps_killjoys.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
as these mechanics begin to surround them.
Basically I’m arguing that the pool of things ‘game designers couldn’t care less about’ is things we should be learning and finding ways of improving – bringing along our unique experiences, not simply integrating / slapping them on to our existing mindsets and/or jumping ship to more profitable shores. Gaming as a medium and as a study is still relatively new and is catching on still at measurable rates. Achievement mechanics caught on faster even though they were pushed later because they’re more bite size and more congruent with the social tide at the moment but that doesn’t yet indicate that society is moving AWAY from games towards microgaming.
Reid: I’m not ‘not interested’ in gameplay that lacks depth – quite the contrary as I work in social games. However I don’t believe that minds are fundamentally ‘wired differently’, we just need different approaches for ‘fun’. The analogy could be likened to teaching: some students learn better using different methods.
All the things that we enjoy about more complicated games are enjoyable to people who only play mafia wars, but we just haven’t figured out to communicate with them / compel them in a way they’re interested in. I can’t believe that the ‘facebook masses’ do not get the same pleasure from learning and mastery as more dedicated gamers – we just haven’t figured out how to trigger it as well as we have with hardcore gamers.
I think we agree but I feel like trying to reword my argument a little. I always felt like this was a tricky area.
When people argue about the game industry they seem to want to argue outside of the video games that common folk play (Wii, facebook, Sports games on consoles). Or, they discount it as a fad (while we all forget that American consumers labeled video games as a fad, the central issue with reference to the legitimacy of games even today). They also seem to want to eschew the so-called AAA titles. In the long run, video games have to make AAA titles. They have to make money and in making money they inevitably alienate their audiences by making more of the same thing that made money last time.
On the other side of this, game studies. While I love every second of games studies, it seems more focused on things like what Jason Roher or whichever indie developer has a new title out. This could just be my own selection of game studies texts. In this way, the stuff from game studies, the ideas from game studies, have yet to really make an impact on games everyone plays.
This is where i’m coming from. I hear Schell speak about these things and while I think he is a ways off base, he is picking up on the fact that games are being created en masse, by people who are not game designers. In a sense, society may be brushing off video games as they are now for some sort of ARG-like series of blips and bleeps that mean nothing more than a momentary distraction at work or on the way to work.
That consumers aren’t buying video games as game designers make them but are playing and paying for them in a way that is a slap in the face to game makers is something I wish people would take away from this speech.
Nick: yeah, we seem to mostly agree on this:
I’d like to see game designers learning from these en masse games, and then seeing what they can bring to the table from all their experience with other games – both to bring to the en masse table, and what new things they learn they can bring to their games.
I find it odd that he says the makers of these games are not game designers. Perhaps traditionally they are not, but they are designing games. They are a new breed of designers. Game designers have always come from a variety of backgrounds: Writing for those who make story games, sociology, economics and/or psychology for those who make online games. Now we have game designers who come from backgrounds in web metrics, marketing, and a/b testing. These are skills that all game designers should now take note of and try to absorb under the game design umbrella – not forget everything they know and go make farming sims.
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