Daily Archives: June 3, 2012

Facing the Book

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Facebook, that is, and my recent hardcore addiction to it. Or specifically, its games.

It may seem odd that a long time hardcore gaming addict should fall prey to the same gaming trap that sucks in Farmville loving housewives and grandmothers having Words with Friends, but there is no doubt about it, I am addicted, and like with hard drugs like heroin and crack, the time between initial exposure and serious addiction was very brief. I was hooked pretty much right away. Even as I type these words, I feel a strong urge to go play them and see how all my little virtual worlds are doing. But I will not, because if I did, there is no way I would be able to restrain myself and continue to write.

Now as a student of the video game form (in much the sense that a wino is a student of the grape), I have to ask myself just what it is that took my jaded self so hard and so fast.

I mean, I have been playing video games since I was barely tall enough to see only the top half of the Space Invaders screen. Surely I should have a fairly high resistance to all their tricks and guiles. Yet the Facebook game phenomenon felled me like a heart-struck elk. What gives?

I think the key here is that the truly addictive ones are designed to be a sort of Satanic synthesis of all the various elements that can make a video game addictive, all turned up way past eleven.

Here are some of those elements, in no particular order.

  • Colorful, cartoon style graphics. Attractive cartoon graphics are inherently visually rewarding to the player, making every interaction colorful and fun. The rise of the Angry Birds juggernaut attests to that. Add in some fun sound effects, and the game becomes pleasurable to interact with purely as a toy, with the discovery of a new animation generating the sort of delight that a baby feels when discovering that shaking an object makes a noise.
  • Keeping you very busy . The brightest and most amusing animations in the world would not have much effect if they were few and far between, so the games make sure to give you tons of little tasks to do in order to keep those rewards coming fast and strong.
  • A full mind is a happy mind. Also, by giving the player so many things to do, the games can create that highly pleasurable feeling of being “in the zone”, operating at peak efficiency, which has the powerfully addictive effect of pushing all the noise and confusion out of one’s mind and letting one be truly absorbed in the moment. All video games have this potential, but these Facebook games do everything to maximize this potential.
  • Constant small rewards. In addition to the other forms of reward, in these games every little action generates some small, incremental in game reward. Just a little bump, like some gold pieces, a resource you might need later, experience points, or whatever. This reinforces the rewards from the animation on a higher mental level, and increases the pleasure and hence the addictiveness.
  • Quests, lists, and goals. And to complete the troika, all of these games give you lots of medium-term goals, usually but not always called quests, for the previous two levels of reward to slot into, making every action immediately rewarding, incrementally rewarding, and goal oriented rewarding, and this creates a broad and seamless reward stream that is potently addictive.
  • My spreading empire. Those three levels then nest neatly into an open-ended long term goal structure based on growth. Your castle gets bigger and nicer looking, you get closer and closer to being able to defeat the evil Count Villainous, you go up levels and have more powerful abilities. The more you play, the more you have. Powerful stuff.
  • Just a little friendly competition. And if that is not enough to get you to devote yourself to the game, all these games have ways of letting you compete against both your friends and all the other players in general, so that the more (and better) you play, the higher your name climbs on the leaderboard, thus drawing in the people for whom interpersonal competition is a powerful draw.
  • And as the pusher always says… … the first time is free. Thus, there is no entry bar. All these games are free to start and technically free to play forever.

And with that, we start getting into the dark side of these games. If all these games consisted of was a fun, additive, but highly rewarding experience, they might cause a dip in productivity but they would hold no sinister underside.

But these games are profit driven enterprises, and all these potent manipulations of the reward center of the brain have one goal in mind : to convince you to pay them real money for virtual items, and what is more, to convince you that it is entirely your idea to do so.

The secret lies in their dual currency systems. All these games have two virtual currencies : a common, easily acquired one which you get via gameplay, and a second one that they give you just a little bit of at first but that costs real money to get after that.

Usually but not always, the difference is made explicit by having the lesser currency be silver, and the other be gold.

And you can play the game as much as you like without ever buying any of the for-pay currency. You are never forced to pay money to continue in the game. Not… exactly.

However, the games are so structured that in order to keep playing continuously, you have to pay. They offer you a very rich stimulation stream, made especially rich at the beginning of course, only to have it suddenly end when you turn out of a third currency, often called “energy”.

And you can get more energy right now…. for real money currency. They are counting on your desire to maintain this high stimulation level in order to get the dollars from your pockets.

Also, of course, there are “premium” virtual items that you can only get via the real-money currency, things that are more powerful, make the game easier, or just plain give the exact same sort of signals of wealth and status that real world luxury goods give off, and for a fraction of the price.

So while I am so far enjoying playing all these little games, I am fully aware that, as appealing as they seem, they are basically machines to create psychological addiction for profit.

And I imagine I will get burned out on them soon enough.

Luckily, I can’t afford to get truly addicted.

Bachelorettes In Prison!

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Oh wait, that should be bachelorettes AND prison. My bad.

There are two articesl hanging around my browser looking bored and wondering when I will get around to commenting on them, and today I decided to give in to the guilt and let them have their say.

The first one is another example of procrastination making me quite late for the party on an issue, but it is an opinion piece which concerns the recent hooha over a gay bar banning bachlorette parties.

First of all, before this broke, I had no idea that having your bachelorette party at a gay bar was even a thing. It would not have occurred to me that straight ladies would do this, although in retrospect, the logic of it is obvious. You can have your bachelorette party at a bar with a somewhat outrageous and sexually open atmosphere that is full of hot guys wearing next to nothing shaking their groove things, and yet feel perfectly safe because you are (somewhat naively) sure that none of these hot guys will be hitting on you or any of your future bridesmaids.

Now right of the bat, that sounds exploitative, does it not? The feelings of the gay men who frequent the club are not even a consideration. Maybe they do not like being treated like testosterone wallpaper, or worse, unpaid strippers, for the amusement of a bunch of loud, obnoxious, drunk women who will feel perfectly safe making crude, fumbling passes at them and their boyfriends and who treat the other paying patrons like they are all part of some exotic show.

And all while patting themselves on the back about how progressive they are for being “willing” to have such an important event at a bar for, you know, those people.

Want to be progressive? Have it at a lesbian bar.

That is not even counting the political issue about celebrating marriage in front of people who cannot get married to the person of their choice.

But still, it took me a while to sort out my feelings out about this issue, because like a lot of outsiders, I am inherently biased towards inclusiveness. I do not want to kick anyone out unless it becomes absolutely necessary due to their behaviour. I want everyone to be together and get along. The idea of refusing any defined group entry rankles me. And to do it for political reasons makes me feel ill in the pit of my stomach.

But I think I have to side with the ban on this issue. These bachelorette parties sound like they are highly disruptive to the kind of safe haven atmosphere that a gay bar has to generate in this cruel and unfeeling world. And the sad and undeniable fact is that sometimes, in order to create an atmosphere of inclusion for one group, another group has to be excluded.

Even typing those words makes me feel ill. But there are plenty of other places for ladies to have their stagette parties. Nobody is denying them that right.

They just have to do it somewhere else.

The other story I wanted to touch on is this story from Norway about the world’s nicest prison.

Briefly, the story is about Bastoy Prison, a prison located on a small Norwegian island that is run far more like a summer holiday camp than a prison.

There’s a beach where prisoners sunbathe in the summer, plenty of good fishing spots, a sauna and tennis courts. Horses roam gravel roads. Some of the 115 prisoners here — all men and serving time for murder, rape and trafficking heroin, among other crimes — stay in wooden cottages, painted cheery red. They come and go as they please. Others live in “The Big House,” a white mansion on a hill that, on the inside, looks like a college dorm. A chicken lives in the basement, a guard said, and provides eggs for the inmates.

And here is the kicker : they have a very low recidivism rate. Only 20 percent of inmates reoffend within two years of leaving Bastoy. And that is what we want, right?

I mean, we pay a lot of lip service to the idea that a “penitentiary” is someplace we send people to be “rehabilitated”, right? The idea is prevent crime in the future. We want to make good, normal, law-abiding citizens of these people. Right?

Or do we? I imagine a lot of people would howl with outrage at the idea of a prison that treats murderers and rapists so well. After all, these people have done horrible, horrible things and we need to punish them for it. That is what we want to do and that is what feels good, feels right, when people have made us angry. Lash out, make them suffer, call it justice, and then act surprised when treating people like animals in cages turns them into the very sort of anti-civilized monsters we do not want roaming the streets.

So what is more important, our safety or our urge to punish? The prevention of crime, or our bloodlust for vengeance? What would you say to the relatives of a person killed by someone fresh out of prison who had lived so long in that savage environment that they were barely even human any more?

Would you tell them it was worth it, because we made the criminal suffer? That we would gladly have more citizens suffer and die from the actions of dehumanized brutes rather than restrain our lust for revenge and our deep sick desire for a little piece of the suffering of a stranger?

I mean, we have to hurt and torture and dehumanize somebody, right? Someone has to fill in for all the people in our lives we wish we could punish but cannot or will not. And we have criminals in our power, helpless and vulnerable, perfect whipping boys for whatever is pissing us off.

So what if a few extra people die? Just more of an excuse to punish!

The party never ends!

Or maybe we could learn from Bastoy that what these people need is civilizing influences, not savagery.