(colectie de articole & citate)
„We cannot simply dismiss video games and Facebook as mere ‘wastes of time.’ Instead, we are obligated to educate ourselves about them, and to try to understand what they mean, and what it means that we use them.
Over seventy-three million people play Farmville.[7] Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.[8]
Farmville is popular because it entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people. – Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe. – [W]e must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use people’s sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners’ needs.’”
„Every game is a system that you interact with; listening to and responding to your actions in a certain way. Every game is teaching your brain something, every game is a dialogue with its player. Its no wonder that people will spend hours grinding for loot if their brains are conditioned to do so by the most efficient reward system that we know of. Does this mean that they are actually having a good time? They might be, but they might also just say that they had a good time after the fact. Another psychological effect causes us to post fact self-justify the amount of time we spend performing any action because we never like to believe we are wasting our precious resources of time and money.”
Robotic Shed – Behaviourist Game Design
„Psychological studies have shown that random reward schedules are usually the most effective, so it’s no coincidence that you see them in the most addictive games. For example, every enemy or container in Diablo is like a piñata — there is a random chance that it will drop something good if you click on it. This combines with the sunk cost fallacy very effectively. Once you’ve killed three enemies looking for a rare item, you can’t stop now… you have to keep going until you get it! Many games use well-designed rewards to convince players that they’ve accomplished something important, even when they’ve only completed a trivial task.’ – ‘There’s a vital question that is rarely asked: does our game make players happy when they play, or just make them sad when they stop? This is a subtle distinction, and irrelevant to sales, but I think it’s very important. Medicine and heroin both sell for a high price, but I would sleep better at night selling one than the other”
Comentarii
Un răspuns la „Ca ne place sau nu..”
In my experience, not so much. MMO’s have been on the market for ages and have the same web of obligations, addictive patterns etc. But they do die out. Surely. But slowly.
Also, I never found it hard to reject a Farmville gift or Facebook causes invitation or the like, because most communications from my facebook friends consists of spam they have been ‘incentivised’ to send me, therefore not personal. I seriously doubt any of them tracks whether of not I accepted.