When Ian Bogost launched Cow Clicker, he intended it to be a satire of social games like Farmville, a demonstration of what’s wrong with them in the form of a working model. Cow Clicker may be taking off, by hooking critics of social gaming into clicking their cows daily, even if (as many protest) only ironically, but I’d argue that Cow Clicker is somewhat flawed. As a critique of social games, Cow Clicker has some huge, gaping holes in its working model. Why? Because it’s not exploiting its players enough.

Now, to explain what I mean, I’m going to make an argument about social games, and the way they work. But it’s important to note that I’m talking here about one particular type of social gaming. Games that fit this mould are reasonably identifiable (free to play, minimal free content, paid content gives game advantages, etc.) and if you’re not doing social games this way, this argument probably doesn’t apply to you. It doesn’t apply to games like Neptune’s Pride, or to Words With Friends. It does apply to many of the games made by companies like Zynga, and it does apply to the prominent of these games: Farmville.

So let’s look at the way that games like Farmville are social. They broadcast your activity to your friends, letting them know what you’re up to. They allow you to collaborate with your friends in the game, and the shared activity strengthens the social bonds between you. Sounds great! Except that they also reward you for these social activities. Collaborating with your friends gives you a mechanical advantage in the game, so there’s a strong encouragement to get your friends involved, and keep them involved. The game rewards gaming your social network, and effectively makes your friends into resources. You’re encouraged to stay because your friends are involved, and you’re helping them, and they’re helping you. Your friends get the same encouragement. The social bond is further strengthened because you’re mutually dependent on each other for your performance in the tasks required for success in the game.

This in itself isn’t so terrible. Many existing social structures function along these lines. Many real-world social groups, from religions to community groups, to political parties, to trading consortiums and sporting groups, work in similar ways. Interdependence is the basis of any collective action. People group together to tackle tasks, because together they can do more than the sum of what each of them could do individually. But the situation with social games is different, and it’s different for two primary reasons.

First, social games like Farmville make huge assloads of money. All that money comes from player contributions. Whether they’re payments of real money for virtual goods, or potential attention paid to ads and whatnot, or promoting the game among their social network, it’s all stuff the players are putting in. In most social structures where participants make contributions, they’re ostensibly for the purposes of maintaining and improving the social structure that the participants are involved in. Maybe they’re paying for sports uniforms, or expanding a consortium’s operations, or funding the expenses involved with running a church or community group. The point is, participants contribute on the basis that their contribution is maintaining or improving the organisation as a whole, which benefits them just as it does everyone else involved. Zynga is estimated to be worth 4.5 billion, and Steven Carpenter at TechCrunch says they’re probably making $15m profit per month, with a 30% net profit margin. That’s a whole lot of money left over after maintaining and improving the social structure players are participating in. What this means is that players’ participation in and contributions to the social structure they’re involved with produce a huge 30% surplus after accounting for maintenance and improvements. The players are putting in so much, that after taking out costs there’s a huge surplus, which the company pockets.

But part of what they’re getting is the enjoyment of playing the game, right? This is the second issue with social games. Because the vast majority of them involve play that is simple, repetitive and minimally rewarding, if not outright trivial. This is the point that Bogost makes: that most of these social games amount to little more than ‘cow clicking’. Bogost’s Cow Clicker is an exaggeration, but it’s not a huge one. In other similar social structures, the reason for participation is the reward that participants get for achieving the goals they achieve together. In a trading consortium you get a monetary profit. In a sporting group you get to play the sport. In a political party you get to change things. The point is that there’s not a lot that players of social games are getting out of the game in terms of actual gameplay.

The result is that players of social games like these are putting in a whole lot, and not getting a whole lot back in return. Their contributions generate value, but a huge proportion of that value’s not coming back to them at all. It’s going to the companies that run the games. In the case of Zynga, that’s 30%, almost a full third, of the value generated by players. ‘But wait’, you say, ‘Zynga’s not running a charity or a social group here, they’re a business. Of course they’re trying to make money’. Well, sure, but the issue is that what they’re really doing with social games is running a social structure, and treating it like a business. They’re taking the value generated by the playerbase’s collective contributions, and pocketing a huge chunk of it. There’s a word for that, and that word is ‘exploitation’.

Well, sheesh, these players must be pretty dumb to be exploited like that. What a bunch of losers. Right? Wrong. This is blaming the victim. Social game developers complain bitterly about the negative, derisive and derogatory attitudes to social game players that gamers from the more traditional ‘hardcore’ demographic express, and rightly so. Players of social games are engaging with games, and engaging with their social networks, in ways that interest them. Many of them are people who wouldn’t normally engage with games. The issue is that social gaming companies aren’t making a fair trade. They’re buying Manhattan for beads, and doing so in the full knowledge that the trade is unfair. But there aren’t a lot of alternative ways for them to engage with games in the same ways. Like sweatshop workers, the deal may stink, but there’s nowhere else for them to go. What players of social games deserve is to be rewarded for their engagement and their contributions with meaningful gameplay experiences. And these social games aren’t giving them that.

So, back to Cow Clicker. Bogost argues in ‘Persuasive Games’ that games form what he calls ‘procedural rhetoric’. The idea, as I understand it, is essentially that gameplay systems form an argument that things – generally systems in the real world – work in an analogous way. Now, Cow Clicker is a great argument that the gameplay of social games work the way Cow Clicker works. The problem is that Cow Clicker is only about the gameplay. It’s only a simulation of the experience of playing a social game. But it doesn’t really speak to the way social games function as systems. A game that might follow the logic of Bogost’s procedural rhetoric in a way more relevant to the social gaming system might be something along the lines of a management sim about running a social gaming development company. Trying to gain and retain users who contribute value to your game, using metrics-based design to extract the maximum income from your users with the minimum expenditure on gameplay, and doing all this to maximise profits. That sort of thing. You know, on reflection, maybe Cow Clicker already is that game. But only for the person playing on the developer’s side. But is the game fun? Ian?

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3. The future of digital distribution

Tags: debates, economics, Farmville, social gaming, Zynga

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 14th, 2010 at 1:43 AM and is filed under Industry. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.