I finally got around to reading Erin’s article. She clearly states some very obvious things about social games and what it takes to create a modern game. These are topics that I honestly didn’t think anyone was still arguing about.
But then I stumbled into the comments and it is like some bizarro flat earth society. Is it really that hard to swallow the following?
- Metrics are a very useful tool for understanding how to tune and design your game.
- People like playing with friends.
- Anything that lets you send messages builds relationships through back and forth communication.
- Try first and pay later (if you see value) is not inherently immoral. It is actually kind of more moral than spending millions on end caps and then counting on ill informed people to buy your game sight unseen based almost entirely on the box art.
- People who play different types of games are not in fact brain damaged wards of the state that must be protected from evil. Your mom is likely an intelligent adult capable of making rational decisions. You don’t need to ‘protect’ her. Where is your respect for people other than yourself?
In my alternate take on all this, games took a really horrid turn at the end of the 90’s and rapidly decayed from an entrepreneurial endeavor into one populated by corporate weenies, corporate weenie developers and entrenched franchises. Every single person who loves games should be crying and praising the great market forces that indie, social, web, mobile and online have come to save games from the decaying, console, retail misery that has been choking the very soul out of our industry for the past decade. Instead of looking at the amazing and wonderful changes going on and jumping at the bright new opportunities, we get emo whining and cries of immorality. Seriously?
Self labeled gamers = Defensive tribal bigots? That makes me sad.
” Danc on the comment thread to Erin Grossman’s “How Social Games Ate Our Lunch”. (Wish I could give a URL to Danc’s comments; it’s from his Google Reader shared items feed.)