Comments on: The Video Games of Video Games: Prejudices against Social Games verbatim copies of Prejudices against Video Games

By: Patch Wednesday: What Determines how a Game is Played? | The Ludologist

Patch Wednesday: What Determines how a Game is Played? | The Ludologist — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 14:32:50 +0000

[…] Newer critical opinions on social games and free-to-play games also tend to assume that there is a particular type of design that reduces players to mindless automatons. […]

By: The Ludologist » The Continued Disdain for Free to Play

The Ludologist » The Continued Disdain for Free to Play — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:34:22 +0000

[…] of the medium has degraded? Really? On a basic level, I still feel that this type of criticism is eerily similar to the kinds of criticisms that people tend to direct at video games in general: commercial, […]

By: Gareth Mensah

Gareth Mensah — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 00:09:03 +0000

This is an important article regarding the evolution of mentalities with the introduction of new paradigms, and the human tendency to reduce change to what we’re seen of it in its infancy period. The point about Shakespeare is well taken, the novel was the first digital technology, and during its infancy was seen as a step down from oral tradition. We now take the novel for granted and highly value its contribution, and similarly, we should expect the social game to evolve and seek for such an evolution.

By: Leviathan

Leviathan — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:24:30 +0000

This article hinges on the fact that there exists somewhere a quote about videogames in general (the comparison to skinner boxes) that is similar to the prevalent complaint about social games.

The truth is that Jack Thompson or a clueless parent calling arbitrarily-selected high-profile games “murder simulators” is in no way similar to the current crop of complaints about social games coming from *game designers themselves* just because a psychologist called videogames a skinner box back in the 80s.

Having worked in the past for a major social game company whose “game design playbook” makes way more explicit references to rats and levers and electric shocks than it does to actual human players and meaningful choice and learning game mechanics, I can confidently say that the criticisms about social games are not just sensationalistic prejudice but raise very valid concerns about the ethicality of their game mechanics.

By: Bruno Palermo

Bruno Palermo — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:16:46 +0000

I, personally, agree with Jesper. I’m not a fan of social games either, but it feels, at the very least, weird, that we are, now, using the same criticism at which we used to frown upon when it were directed at other types of games. Jesper’s point, I believe, is not to keep social games from being criticized at all, as dmyers’ post seems to imply, but avoiding being hypocritical when criticizing them.

By: dmyers

dmyers — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:45:39 +0000

Jesper,

1. Aren’t the criticisms you generalize from social games to video games generalizable to ANYTHING people are critical of? That is, these criticisms don’t seem specific to games. Calling someone a “Skinner boxer” is simply classifying that person as anti-humanist, unfeeling, and such. Thus, criticism of social games seems more rightfully a part of the set of criticism in general than part of the set of criticism of video games.

2. I am most critical of social games in how the “social” (most particularly social pressures) within those games differ from the “social” in video games — and in the larger category of games in general. Doesn’t the manipulation of the social in social games offer an opportunity for a critique of social games that differs from a critique of video games?

3. Increasingly, it seems there is some attempt to collapse all video games — heck, to collapse ALL things — into the social. If this collapse takes place, then the issues I raise above collapse as well. That is, if ALL games are rooted in the social then ANY criticism of games is likewise criticism of social games.

Further, this criticism is then interpreted, by extension, as criticism of the social — with a curious set of consequences, including the labeling of social game criticism as anti-community, griefing, indicative of Asperger syndrome, Skinner-boxish, and such. This seems to me both unlikely and unreasonable.

By: Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:37:09 +0000

You think objections should be specific, and yet you cite a pull quote from an old article rather than the specific objections I raised at NYU and then in my Cow Clicker essay and expanded on in the Gamasutra interview.

You call for subtlety but use the tired all-or-nothing comparisons to Jack Thompson and his ilk