81–90 of 121 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than the rest of the game industry?
I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term. You could argue the same about WoW but at least in that case there is a lot to do over a long period before you truly get into the addictive repetition phase. Something like farmville is pretty much that from the start.
I would say that making a game addictive is the holy grail of gaming, no?
When I'm actually playing a game myself, though, and recognizing that these two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, I prefer fun over addictive.
Can you imagine working on Farmville? I mean, it would be like going into work every day to refine the equivilent of the Fisher Price moo farm toy [1] except a) for adults and b) relatively juvenile. Imagine the meetings, mostly run by marketing idiots. "Okay, we need the new chewy coco grove coconut tree special item out by next Monday. So that means everyone's coming in on saturday." But how can you argue with 85 m…
You get to run experiments on a huge number of users. Do a split test and get a significant result in an hour. Figure out a way to make it just 1% stickier and suddenly you created value worth millions to the company. It sounds fascinating and I could easily imagine working there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than the rest of the game industry?
I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.
If it were just a male/female thing, you'd expect games like SimCity and Civilization to not get geek cred, since their appeal straddles gender lines.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You get to run experiments on a huge number of users. Do a split test and get a significant result in an hour. Figure out a way to make it just 1% stickier and suddenly you created value worth millions to the company. It sounds fascinating and I could easily imagine working there.
Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? The more users you get though, the more conservative you become. "But if this drops conversion by 0.1%, that will cost us $100k/week." Gets old fast and stifles change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than the rest of the game industry?
I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.
The reason seems more to be that it's not blazing fast OpenGL 3D supernaturalistic advanced strategy/fps type of game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The games are designed to be addictive, not fun in the long term. You could argue the same about WoW but at least in that case there is a lot to do over a long period before you truly get into the addictive repetition phase. Something like farmville is pretty much that from the start.
I would say that making a game addictive is the holy grail of gaming, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this different than the rest of the game industry?
I hate to say it for fear of giving aid and comfort to my Gender Studies professors, but I think a major portion of the reason why Blizzard et al get geek cred and FarmVille does not is because FarmVille is played by women.
Just throwing this out there: I consider it unethical to invest in Zynga. Edit: They are essentially using psychology, social and otherwise, to ultimately trick people out of their money. A classic on the topic: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming...
Care to expand? I'm not especially familiar with them other than they make some casual games.
Does this mean we can finally abandon the idea that Google's mission is "to organize the world's information"?