Social shaming: My fear of FarmVille

The image of gamers is changing, slowly, and this is largely due to social networking sites. The stereotype of pasty mal-exercised social outcasts gaming for 20 hours-a-day in their mothers’ basement is being replaced by that of “normal” people from a variety of backgrounds, social groups and cultures who do their gaming on sites like Facebook, making gaming more mainstream; so, as a lifelong gamer, why am I afraid to play FarmVille?

Statistics show that social gaming is massive; FarmVille, the game that arguably started the social gaming revolution, has 52 million active users at present. This is dwarfed by the new hot title, CityVille, which has a whopping 98 million active users. To put this into context, that’s more than the population of the United Kingdom. So if gaming has become socially acceptable, as indicated by the sheer numbers of people gaming on one particular application on just one – albeit mammoth – website, should hardcore gamers feel a pang of shame for indulging in these pursuits?

I am a gamer; I have been since the early 1980s. I have owned an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64, a ZX Spectrum, an Amiga 500, a Microsoft PC, a Sega Master System and Mega Drive, a Gameboy, PlayStations 1 & 2, a PSP, an Xbox and a 360 in my gaming career. I have sampled most game genres and rank Real Time Strategy games highly. As one who has witnessed the evolution of video games over the past 3 decades I feel I should embrace the move toward social games, many of which are RTS based that I should enjoy. I speak here of FarmVille, although in reality I’d be more likely to play games like Kingdoms of Camelot or Mafia Wars, but their presence on such a widely used social network puts me off. My reasoning may be debatable, but it’s as follows: I don’t like the idea of everybody on my “friends” list, which includes work colleagues and people on the peripheral of my social circle, being updated every time I sew a field or request help to build a barn. The very nature of social gaming requires this sort of interaction with other users, but having been on the receiving end of countless requests to help others in their gaming efforts, and having been annoyed by the persistence of them despite my not having the same application, I am loathed to inflict this upon my “friends”. It’s the carpet-bombing nature of the applications’ update messages coupled with the lack of customisable privacy options with which I have an issue.

An immediate retort to this would be to say that the option exists within Facebook to ignore all such notifications, however, not everyone chooses to click on this option. This may be because they are happy to receive them, or eager to involve themselves in the game, but what if they’re not? It is entirely possible that people can simply skip through the endless updates spewed out by these applications and, although it could be argued that it is their choice not to get rid of them, I wouldn’t want everyone to see these updates generated by my gaming. I’m not alone in my frustration; an entire anti-FarmVille movement exists within Facebook, born of just this sort of complaint, sporting over 2 million disgruntled users.

For me, collaborative gaming should be about people who want to game together working toward a common goal. If users don’t want to be involved, or don’t have the application, then the system shouldn’t bother them with updates or requests. However, as Facebook and social networks like it have a mandate to expand, it’s not likely that social gaming will move into a less intrusive format any time soon.

I’m sure there are many very worthy games to play in the social gaming genre, but until the scope of who is informed of and involved in my gaming is more tightly controlled it will remain an area of the gaming world that I’ll avoid. I don’t play games on Facebook partly because of the privacy issue and partly due to a reluctance to have my pastimes scrutinised by everyone connected with my social media accounts. I don’t want everyone I know to see what I’m playing and how often I play it; for me, that privilege is reserved for those friends I game with on Xbox LIVE.

Realism in games? Be realistic!

Much is made of the requirements for games to have “realism”. Realistic backdrops, realistic graphics and sound, with realistic weapons causing deadly realistic reactions in our realistic enemies, but do we really want true realism in games? What’s the point?

Take for example the hugely popular Modern Warfare 2. Many gamers would agree that it was a very realistic shooter. Excellent graphics, modern, accurately rendered weapons and absorbing gameplay, all of which lead to the argument that it is very realistic. But is it? I would argue no.

In the case of the single player game, despite the accurate physics and the detailed aesthetics, regardless of how much I enjoyed the game, not once during my experience of it did I feel in danger. I was not in fear of my life and was willing to take enormous risks regularly to progress the game. That is not realistic. The “Army Of One” concept can only go so far. What are the odds of engaging literally hundreds of armed, well trained enemies and coming out unscathed whilst their corpses lie in piles tens high? It simply isn’t feasible.

If one were to make an entirely realistic war game then players would spend months training in seemingly benign scenarios over and over until they react almost instinctively to expected stimulus and follow orders and procedure unquestioningly. They would then be given an idea of where in the world they would be fighting and then spend several more weeks training for that particular environment. There would be frustrating period of acclimatization in an area of the world similar to the conflict zone and then, finally their boots would hit the ground. Once there, players would have an entirely different outlook on the gaming experience, investigating and absorbing everything in the sure knowledge that one explosion, on roadside bomb, one stray bullet would end the game. There would be no re-spawning, no restarting from last checkpoint.

In multiplayer there would be no mindless running and slashing with combat knives so prevalent in the current online experience. Players pre-disposed to this sort of activity would find their game/lives cut very short. More thought would be had to the use of cover and unnecessary risks wouldn’t be taken. That would be more realistic.

Notably, games that have tried to be more realistic, like the realistic limb controls in Jurassic Park: Trespasser for PC, were not so well received. Trespasser aimed to use very realistic physics and make players control arms and wrists individually with very realistic control of movement, but it was difficult. This made firing your weapon effectively harder and often lead to death by Raptor. The game was considered a failure selling just 50,000 copies and receiving poor reviews, this despite the game’s aim to make the experience more realistic.

So perhaps when we talk of realism in games we are referring to the graphics and the sound and the physics engines, but not necessarily the social realism. If we were to act in games as we do in reality then titles such as GTA wouldn’t have such a large appeal. How many of us would actually steal a car, run down pedestrians or leap from skyscrapers after peppering a street full of innocents with a helicopter’s mini-gun? Surely there can’t be that many sociopath gamers. It is the inconsequential nature of games that allows us to act without moral reprisal that would normally be attached to such behaviour.

The mentality of gamers plays a large part in what makes games so popular and successful in the first place. Recently Sid Meiers, creator of Civilization, gave a keynote speech at the 2010 GDC covering the psychology of game design. When games are being made the developers must consider the way gamers think. Why do they play the games in the first place and why they would stop playing? As Meiers said at the conference, “I never received a letter that said ‘Hey Sid, great game but I win too much.’” What he says is true; gamers wouldn’t play a game that they thought was too hard, or which they constantly fail to progress. When you consider that the majority of games place players in situations and roles in which they would never find themselves in reality, then it calls into question whether gamers actually want games to be realistic. They want games they can beat, regardless of the odds and often feel hard done by or cheated if they lose to AI.

There is suspense of disbelief at work here. For an ordinary gamer to expect to be able to take down a special forces squad single-handed isn’t realistic, so surely realism isn’t actually what players want. That’s not to say that we don’t want to be challenged though; a game too easy to beat would be boring, or at the very least have a short shelf life.

So I would suggest that what gamers want is fantastic, not realistic. Fantastic graphics and sound with realistic physics that allows players to engage the fantasy of the game coupled with intuitive control systems. Actions without consequence in the real world are what draw people to games. You may not be a good footballer, but when playing a football game you can compete against and beat some of the greatest athletes in the world. Now that’s fantastic and that’s what video games provide: an escape from day-to-day reality and the ability to pit yourself against unthinkable odds and, more often than not, win.

This article was written for Game Kudos and can be viewed in its edited format here.