Why Zynga's Success Makes Game Designers Gloomy • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Zynga's Success Makes Game Designers Gloomy

#41

Post by rick888 » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 8:02 PM UTC

jlgbecom wrote: post #19

Game developers hate Zynga for the same reason that real comedians hate Dane Cook: Uninspired, unoriginal (borderline theft), and a dilution of the craft. Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly.

"Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly."

Mediocre is a relative term. What is this based on? To you it might mean graphics to me it might mean the storyline.

This happens in more than just the gaming industry. Look at how much attention instant youtube got a few weeks ago. The developer just slapped together some ajax using a pre-built API. As a developer, I could have written the same thing in a relatively short amount of time. Yet, it got him lots of attention and a job offer.

I also say the same thing about things like Django. Rather than knowing how everything works, developers are putting blocks of pre-built code together to build applications. I am almost certain the assembly guys were saying the same thing when C became popular.

Re: Why Zynga's Success Makes Game Designers Gloomy

#42

Post by hugh3 » Thu, Oct 07, 2010, 8:05 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #39

hugh3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other metrics do we have? Social approval among people who fancy themselves game critics?

One possibility (not sure if it's been done) is to try to understand what the players themselves think of the game. Some WoW players love it, some kind of hate it but continue to play it anyway for various reasons, ranging from addiction to sunk cost to social pressure, others vaccilate or are somewhere in between. How does that compare to FarmVille players or to Starcraft 2 players or to slot-machine players? Self-a…

My point is that if you want to evaluate quality you have to leave metrics behind and start looking at opinions. And opinions are like assholes in that they're ubiquitous throughout the population.

Of course you can make up metrics based on averages of everyone's opinions, or weighted averages where you weight by the "sophistication" (in some sense) of the person's opinion. But nobody will believe such metrics anyway, in that you'll never catch anybody saying "I hate this game/book/album, but this reliable metric says it's good, so I guess it must actually be good!"

If Farmville is bad, it falls into the "fascinatingly bad" category of things that are derided by professional opinion-makers but still vastly popular. Genuinely bad games, books and bands are a dime a dozen -- check out a publisher's reject pile, an open mike night or a twelve year old programmer's hard disk for examples -- but fascinatingly bad things like The Da Vinci Code or Nickelback or Farmville deserve a lot more analysis.

Re: Why Zynga's Success Makes Game Designers Gloomy

#43

Post by bemmu » Fri, Oct 08, 2010, 12:31 AM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #30

gacba wrote: post #5

My favorite quote about Zynga, relevant to this discussion, is that "their motto is the exact opposite of Google's 'Do No Evil'". That's what makes me gloomy. They're like the spoiled love child of EA and Microsoft. They have no scruples or creativity and no apologies to make for it.

Oh yes, that reminds me how much of Zynga's properties are ripped off from existing games. Farmville was a straight-up clone of Farm Town, PetVille was a clone of Pet Society... The properties that Zynga are most proud of are the same as the ones they didn't design.

Farming games actually have a pretty long history: http://www.chinasocialgames.com/?p=400

I think this type of game has occurred to many people. Back when I was doing coding for a MUD I was considering adding farming mechanics, because I thought it would be fun to come back later to the game to gather and sell the plants. More fun than the mining mechanic they had, which consisted of basically moving around the map and just typing "mine" over and over again.

But then I figured, who would care about farming when you can already kill monsters in battle. Instead I created a virtual sauna.