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1Prologue
2
3The smaller of the men was still talking about engagement wheels.
4
5“Look at this one,” he said. He clicked to the next PowerPoint slide. “How about it?” Some of the men reacted.
6
7“I . . . I . . . uh, I like this one the best.” He clicked one more time. Some of the prior engagement wheels had resembled close-up snapshots of a brier patch. This one looked like something you might see on a sticker on the side of a recycle bin in a particularly particular hippie commune. If all the engagement wheels today had been girls, this would be the one you’d one day decide you should have married.
8
9The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.
10
11“So after the first half hour, they get a push notification. Their phone vibrates. It tells them their such-and-such is ready for collection.”
12
13The Other Men don’t make any sound. They have collectively folded their hands alongside their Alpine Crystal Spring Superclear Water bottles atop the glass table, collective face intent and weirdly worried, like that of a man hearing the beginning of a joke involving a rabbi, a toddler, and a lizard.
14
15“They open the app. They collect from their such-and-such.
16
17“Now the game tells them they’ve leveled up. It gives them some bonus coins. It tells them they’ve unlocked a new thing — a fancier thing.
18
19“Here’s the important part. When they collect from their such-and-such, it gives them maybe 120 coins. The coin bonus they get for leveling up is about 2,500 coins — that’s magnitudes more than collecting from the such-and-such. Now you tell them to open the store. You show them the new thing you can buy. It should be around 2,200 coins. It’ll leave them with only a couple collections’ worth — maybe a couple collections and a half worth — of coins. We do this on purpose.
20
21“Now they build the new thing, because it’s promising them a thousand coins per hour. So now they have to come back in an hour. And then two hours. And then three hours: there. They’ve made more than enough to cover the initial investment.
22
23“Now they can buy an upgrade — for 2,200 coins — so that their thing will make them 2,000 coins an hour instead of 1,000. The mathematical part of their brain sees this and thinks: ‘That’s double what I was making before.’ Everyone loves when numbers double. We control the game world, we control the numbers: we control the ceiling for doubling. We control the player.
24
25“The player is almost hooked.
26
27“This is very important: now we give them something that gives them a reason to come back in two and a half hours. Then we give them ninety minutes. Then we’re telling them they can get 25% more coins per hour overall — maybe now they’ve got investments bringing them 5,000 coins per hour — if they do this thing that’ll take twenty-four hours.
28
29“If you can hook them for a day, you can hook them for two.”
30
31“And that’s where it becomes tricky,” the smaller of the men says. “If you can hook them for two days it’s very difficult to say whether or not you can hook them for three.
32
33“And if you can hook them for three,” he says, closing his eyes, focusing his pupils perhaps on the core of his head, before opening his eyes and staring right at me, “then they’re going to be considering sticking around for a week.”
34
35“And if they do stick around for a week,” the larger man — he has gold cufflinks — says, “they will not find it difficult at all to conceive of sticking around for a month. Then three months.”
36
37“And once this concept has occurred to them,” the smaller man continues, “they will be ready to spend some money. All we have to do is show them something and say it will take three days to build. Or they can spend eleven in-game premium-currency units to have it right now.
38
39“We sell the in-game premium-currency units twenty for a dollar.”
40
41“The second they buy twenty units, they’re hooked for at least twenty more,” the larger man says.
42
43“How can you say that?” one of the older men says, breaking a long, throaty silence.
44
45“Our man here can tell you all about that.”
46
47I am sitting at the head of the table playing Action Button Entertainment’s ZiGGURAT on my iPhone. I designed this game and am the director of its team of three people infinitely more talented than I am at everything except math and acting like a jerk in public. During this meeting no one is going to mention my game — though during the next one, the guy with the money is going to ask, while someone else is at a toilet break (he drinks a lot of green tea), “What is that? It looks awesome,” and I’ll say “I designed this game” and he will ask to play it; he’ll die six times, his groan of excitement upon death gradually escalating to football-spectator volume by the sixth death. He’ll hand my iPhone 4 back, casually touch his fingertips to his forehead, and say, “I want that.” Then, after a pause, once I’ve jumped back into a game, he’ll say, without a trace of irony, “What is your monetization strategy for that?”
48
49I used to stand up a lot at these meetings. I try not to, anymore. It genuinely took me a couple months to realize that I wasn’t talking about things you should stand up while talking about.
50
51This time, I put my white iPhone 4 to sleep, lay it face down on the board table, fold my hands, and say, “It’s all math. It’s all math and psychology. By which you might say, it’s all economics.” I clear my throat. “Economics and philosophy. By which you might say it’s modern video game design.”
52
53Now the larger man praises me; I am above blushing: “He is an expert at balancing these things. He will construct an algorithm that shrewdly obscures a downward-trending curve for in-game investment values.”
54
55“What we’re saying,” the smaller man says, “is that the other guys are making things that people will fathom playing for three months if they play it for a week, and that we’re going to make a thing that people will consider playing for six months, if they play it for three days. We’ll generate a mathematically proofable engagement wheel. The players will come for the cute characters, and–”
56
57I’m not listening anymore. For all I care, he is probably going to say “The players will come for the cute characters, and stay for the cruel mathematics.”
58
59chapter one: the man who spent one dollar and seventy cents
60
61Here I am: The Worst Journalist In The World. I was once a person who wrote about technology and entertainment; then I figured that, in order to ask better questions while talking to people who made things, I should try making those things myself. Years passed. I worked on some games. Just as weightlifting doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t painful, I could say I drifted toward projects I found morbidly fascinating more than I drifted toward projects I thought would be fun. More years passed, and I was somehow involved in making iPhone applications for kids to stare at while their moms drive to the supermarket.
62
63The idea of an iPhone application is: for someone to download it, they have to have an iTunes Store account. Most people with iTunes Store accounts have credit cards on file. If their credit cards weren’t on file, this trick wouldn’t work: the kid says “Hey mom, can I buy this thing for a dollar in this game?” and the mom says, “What?” She stops at a red light. “Can you put in your password?” She puts in her password — or, better (we estimate it’s 20% of the time) she tells the child the password. (Now he knows her password. (For our purposes, that’s as good as knowing her credit card number.))
64
65At the 2010 Game Developer’s Conference, “social gaming” is all anyone was talking about. I already knew more than a little bit about it — there were games on Facebook, and the ideal user keeps the game open in a tab while doing work or checking email or watching cat videos on YouTube. The game keeps giving the user cute little reasons to come back, and maybe, after a week, they’ve spent a dollar.
66
67By GDC in March of 2010, the thing had exploded. Electronic Arts had just paid a company called PlayFish something like eight trillion dollars, and Playfish had, as far as Call of Duty fans were concerned, never actually done anything except sit around and beg Electronic Arts for eight trillion dollars.
68
69As I attended boring lectures and stone-cold seminars, the reality settled onto the gathered bright-eyed, idea-filled game developers like an ashen snow-blanket: these Zynga guys were making literally a quadrillion dollars a month off trite, shallow, ugly, awful, stupid half-formed pseudo-games. I found myself drawn to sessions in which tasteful, boring people talked about the implications of social games. I wound up with the fanciful idea in my brain that I’d write a New-Yorker-worthy thing about social games and the global financial crisis. It’d be simultaneously clever, stupid, and sad.
70
71A year passed, and GDC whipped right around again. Now I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area — no longer Tokyo — and everyone at GDC was talking about “Gamification”.
72
73You may wonder what “Gamification” is. I will tell you: “Gamification” is a thing that, when mispronounced, might be an uglier word than “blog”.
74
75It’s also what you call some people’s idea that the world would work better — that we’d solve all sorts of high-concept problems (war, hunger, baldness) — if the risk-reward structure of games could be applied to tasks such as clocking into work on time, doing your taxes, emailing a co-worker a timely response, or brushing your teeth. One “gamification” expert goes so far as to say that “reality is broken”, and that only games can “fix” reality. This expert wrote a book which magnificently proves that at least one person on earth has held more conversations with psychologists than grocery baggers. Depending on my mood, I’ll shrug and go either way: half of the time, I’ll agree that reality is broken. Of course it is: why can’t I just be happy all the time? Why do I get hungry? Why do I have to keep going to the bathroom? Why won’t the girl I like just marry me already? I’ve asked her like ninety-two times.
76
77However, I personally believe that games are also broken — games now more closely resemble little league baseball in the 1990s (everyone gets an identical trophy at the end of the season, even if their pitcher never threw a ball across the plate, even if no bat held by any player on their team ever touched a baseball with that bat) than the spartan, terrifying cyber-contests that whipped us into shape way back when (way back when little league baseball was trying to turn us into babies again). If these wannabe reality-repairmen were to adapt modern game design concepts into their would-be world-skin, we’d likely end up with rules where if you manage to avoid stepping on a sidewalk crack for seventy-two hours, you unlock the “Won The Lottery” achievement, and now you have a hundred million dollars. If they were to take their lessons from Super Mario Kart, anyone being fired from seven jobs in a row after working less than a week at each would be awarded a remote controller which could stop any other human’s heart: just point, and click.
78
79(List of games that are not broken: sumo wrestling, Pong.)
80
81You might not be able to tell, with the attitude I present here, that I once found these things incredibly interesting — even for more than an hour. So, there I was, The Worst Journalist in the World, getting involved, again.
82
83I talked with a few experts in this brand-new field long enough to realize that the train was still on the platform, as it were, and that I could get on board and be an expert, myself, in a few easy steps.
84
85So I got on the train. I found a good seat. I sat and read Moby-Dick on my Kindle cover to cover (oh how that expression has become an idiom!) six times, feeling so relatively alone, before we started getting anywhere.
86
87The Useful Statistic:
88
89A year ago, if you talked to anyone about social games, they’d inevitably throw out this popular statistic: if you divide the combined total amount of money yet made by all social games by the combined total number of people who have played any social game even once, you’d see that social games make an average of one dollar and seventy cents per person.
90
91Of course, there are people — like me — who would never spend money on one of those games. That’s actually ninety-five-ish percent of the people.
92
93And then there are the people — statistics show they are middle-aged women — who will gladly spend upward of $10,000 on one game in less than a year.
94
95The average money spent on a social game by The User Who Actually Spends Money is $60. (The field of Users Who Actually Spend Money, of course, which only accounts for 10% of players, also includes the white whales who spend $10,000. This perhaps gives you an idea of the rift.)
96
97We’re not going to talk about either of these sets of two types of people (the white whales and the non-payers or the white whales and the sixty-dollar users). We’re going to talk about the Ghost In The Middle — the person who actually does spend one dollar and seventy cents.
98
99This person, naturally, doesn’t exist in exact dimensions. In reality, he spends either one cent or nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. Somewhere, in The Social Games Dimension, math is distorted, and the average of those two amounts is one dollar and seventy cents. So we are going to have to approximate, and probably use our imaginations a whole heck of a lot.
100
101What follows is two stories, framed by a larger story. The larger story is that, recently, For Professional Reasons, I decided to play The Sims Social on Facebook — the fruit of Electronic Arts’ astronomical investment in Playfish, announced just before GDC 2010 — for the purposes of drafting a spreadsheet extrapolating all sorts of confusing — and, eventually, terrifying — data from an analysis of its many-tiered game-world economy.
102
103One of the smaller stories is about me — The Worst Journalist In The World, now about as experienced in the field I’m writing about as many of the people I could interview — and my attempt to craft a game economy that brings in a a dollar and seventy-one cents per user. To do this, I committed the journalistic equivalent of filing a missing person’s report with my own name on it, playing every social game I can get my hands on, searching, yearning, for the one that will finally make me break down and pay money. Spoilers: I didn’t find one. (Story over.)
104
105The other smaller story is just a murder mystery. Don’t be sad: it’s only a metaphor. The victim isn’t a real person: it’s just videogames — just our future, just the mask some seek to pull down over reality to make it More Engaging.
106
107We will not, by the time this is over, have a clear idea of who the killer is, or even why he did it. If you want, when you get to the end, you can say it’s me. You wouldn’t be far off. (It’s also you.)
108
109chapter two: the ghost in the middle
110The “average” social game player spends a total of one dollar and seventy cents over the course of his experience with the game.
111
112We established above that no one actually spends a dollar and seventy cents on a social game. That number is just an average. However, as far as averages go, it’s fairly ridiculous: it’s the average of a list of numbers that includes a few five-digit numbers and a sprawling ocean of zeroes.
113
114For one thing: no social game offers you a microtransaction priced at a dollar seventy. Some games — like Tap Zoo for mobile — will offer you a one-dollar package and then a ten dollar package. The Sims Social, which, being a miraculous intersection of all current social gaming trends, we will use as a primary example in this . . . whatever it is, offers a five-dollar package as the minimum microtransaction.
115
116Math is funny, especially when you’re looking at numbers that represent people. People tend to be pretty different from one another. Crazy-different people are what statistics call “outliers”. Outliers skew the averages. In the case of social games, we’re dealing with a couple mammoth outliers and an abundance of zeroes. This creates, in the $1.70 user, the fluffiest of math ghosts.
117
118“Should we let the user play for free?” the smaller man rhetorically asked the older men.
119
120“Of course we should,” the larger man said with an amicable face, standing up, rotating slowly, shining the spotlights of his cheeks over all gathered faces, showing his palms diagonally to the ceiling.
121
122“The question is, how much should we let them play?” the smaller man asked, pointing a pen at the ceiling so nonchalantly no one looked up. He tapped the pen on the table. He clicked his Macbook Pro’s trackpad. The slide changed with a little sideways wipe effect: this is the part in the presentation where he had decided to get fancy.
123
124One of the older guys stopped chewing gum for an instant. It’s only when he stopped chewing the gum that the weight of my annoyance with a man who would chew gum at a business meeting comes fully crashing down on my shoulders: “He’s going to start chewing that gum again.”
125
126If this were a film, this is where the gum-chewing man would ask, “What am I looking at?” I can see that look in his face now, clear as day: It’s true that he probably doesn’t know what he’s looking at. Maybe he gets the basic idea: he’s looking at four large, capital letters.
127
128“We’re living in the FTP age,” the smaller man said.
129
130“That’s free-to-play,” the larger man said, swinging his cufflinks up, then down.
131
132The smaller man cleared his throat. He clicked twice. He narrowed his eyes at the computer screen.
133
134“I remember when FTP stood for something else,” I said, as a sort of joke.
135
136“Wh–”
137
138“Free to play, yes,” the smaller man said, looking back up from his computer screen. “Research shows that players are more likely to play a game that’s free.” He cleared his throat again. Again he double-clicked something.
139
140He’s reading his email during a pitch meeting. It was probably an email from the next person he was going to ask for money.
141
142“And that most people who win the lottery don’t tear their tickets up,” I said.
143
144The small man ignored my comment. He looked up. “Yes. Yes, so what you want to do, is let the player taste every feature of the game in as short a time as possible. We call this the FTUE.”
145
146He pronounced it “Fuh-too-ey”.
147
148He pointed at the slide. The perplexing letters did not yet make sense. With the next click of the smaller man’s Macbook Pro’s trackpad, they did:
149
150First Time User Experience
151“If you look at Tap Pet Shop or Tap Zoo, you’ll see they’ve got it down to a science. When you start Tap Pet Shop, you have sixty “coins”. You’re on level one. Level-one players can only purchase one pet habitat: a golden retriever pen. It costs twenty coins. The pen comes with one golden retriever. The game points you to it and makes you buy it. Then the game tells you you can buy a companion for the golden retriever. The companion costs twenty coins. Then the game tells you you can make them mate for twenty more coins. You pay the money. Now it tells you the mate will be born in five minutes, or you can spend one “Paw” to have the baby right now. Conveniently, you have one “paw”. Spend it, and the baby is born. This earns you one experience point: surprise: that’s enough to bring you up to level two. The game tells you: ‘You leveled up! Now you can buy more habitats. Also, you earned rewards: here’s a bunch more money.’ It gives you 280 coins. You can buy a ‘cat condo’ or a turtle aquarium for 140 coins each — or you can buy one or the other, plus a companion. The cat condo gets you–uhh–”
152
153“The cat condo will give you 70 coins every thirty minutes,” I say. “And the box turtles will get you 120 coins every sixty minutes. The numbers here are actually highly interesting,” I said, and then looked back to my iPhone 4 screen, and fell into silence.
154
155“That’s absolutely correct,” the larger man said a moment later, snapping his fingers and pointing at me. “Numbers guy, over there.”
156
157“I’m the numbers guy,” I said.
158
159“Numbers guy!”
160
161“Just tell me what you want me to count,” I said, and then decided not to finish the sentence.
162
163“So the game tells the player, with its last message: you’ll get some money from your cats in thirty minutes, or your turtle in sixty minutes, and from your retrievers in five minutes. Then it says, oh, look at this: you can visit your friends’ pet shops. Tap here to see. Now you tap an icon that says ‘visit friend’. A popup tells the player: visiting your friends’ pet shops is fun! This is something you want to do. Now, when you tap, it takes you to this amazingly elaborate pet shop. It’s just equipped to the teeth. It’d cost you–”
164
165“–it’d cost you around six thousand dollars if you wanted that kind of pet shop right away,” I said.
166
167“Six thousand dollars!”
168
169“The average user isn’t going to spend six thousand dollars,” the smaller man said. “They offer multiple real-world currency unit packages, ranging from one dollar to one hundred dollars.”
170
171“Now, the game shows you another tutorial popup, before you can really get a grasp of your surroundings in this elaborate pet shop. It says you can go home to your pet shop. So you press that button. Now it tells you ‘your retriever is ready for collection’.”
172
173“Collection of what?” one of the old men asked. He was looking at the smaller man’s white iPhone 4 screen — it’s Tap Pet Shop. Not much was going on inside that pet shop.
174
175“Collection of money. The animals generate money.”
176
177“With what?” one of the guys said with a little laugh.
178
179“The — customers are constantly bustling about in the store.”
180
181“So they buy the animals?”
182
183“No,” I interject. “It’s all fairly abstract. The mechanics would get far too complicated if the customers in the pet shop could actually buy the animals that are on sale.”
184
185“Huh.”
186
187“The average player — well, the average player whom the game is going to engage — wants to pretend to be a pet shop owner. They don’t want to just be a person who sells animals.”
188
189The would-be investor blinked at my explanation. “How is it a pet shop if you’re not selling the animals?”
190
191“This,” I said, pointing at the ceiling in a way that made everyone’s eyeballs rotate upward for a moment, “is what suffices for escapism in the modern age.” I rammed my finger into the tabletop.
192
193“Our game will use a different metaphor,” the smaller man said, hurriedly.
194
195“So,” the larger man says, his voice cutting through all of ours, “you’re back in your pet shop. There’s a heart floating above the retriever. The game says ‘your retriever is ready for collection! Tap the retriever to collect.’ You tap the receiver.”
196
197“Retriever,” the smaller man said, in a low voice.
198
199“You tap the retriever. The game gives you twenty coins and three experience. Now a final popup tells you: your other animals will be ready for collection soon. Please check back later! And then it kicks you right out of the app. This has all happened in less than one and a half minutes. One minute, if you’re tapping quickly.”
200
201“And this is the important part,” the smaller man said.
202
203“In five minutes, the phone is going to buzz. It’s going to be a push notification. It’s going to say that your retriever is ready for collection again.”
204
205“So you tap and it reopens the app,” the smaller man said. “Your retriever is ready for collection. Your cats and-or turtles are not.”
206
207“Push notifications are, of course, enabled by default,” the larger man said.
208
209“And five minutes — five minutes,” the smaller man said, “is soon enough after installing the game for the player to still have that emotional attachment to ensure that the player comes back.”
210
211“What emotional attachment?” an older person asked.
212
213“Well,” the larger man said, grinning, “the emotional attachment established by enduring the process of seeking out and downloading the app. They don’t know it yet, though they’re hooked from before they download the app.”
214
215“Or, perhaps,” the smaller man said, “they’re open to the idea of being hooked when they decide to type the app’s name in the App Store ‘search’ field.”
216
217“They collect from the retriever, and then, twenty-five minutes later, if they decided to build the ‘cat condo’–”
218
219“–Which is, certainly, what they’d choose–” (me)
220
221“–they’ll get another notification. They’ll open the app. They’ll make their first collection from the cat condo. It’s enough to get them to level 3. They get some more money, enough to build another habitat.”
222
223“And thirty minutes after that,” the smaller man said, “they get notified about the turtle.”
224
225“Now the game tells them they can expand the size of their store.”
226
227“And it costs way more money than they have in the bank now.”
228
229“Here is where the player naturally decides to become a virtual businessman,” I said. “They start doing rough calculations: how many collections of which animals they’ll need to make, how much time that’s going to take, how many times they’ll have to check their phone every hour — or five minutes. At first, it’s all very feasible that they can expand their store within, say, the workday.”
230
231“So — so . . .” the older person washolding two hand-knives out in front of his body, his eyeballs looking down at the iPhone 4 on the table and then back up repeatedly. “Collecting the virtual money from the virtual pets in the pet store whose pet supply does not diminish requires action from the user.”
232
233“Yes,” I said, pointing a finger-pistol at his chest. “It requires the player to take action to collect the money. This is why the player comes back again and again. The game-world does not grow without the player popping in and out.”
234
235“And the mechanics of the game,” the smaller man chimed in, “are so simple — simply touch an animal who is ready to collect in order to collect, touch an animal who is breeding to see how much time remains before the baby is born — that any given ‘pop-in’ lasts a minute at the very most.”
236
237“Continue.”
238
239The larger man cleared his throat and gave a little grin. “When the user finally pays up the cash to expand the store, we tell them that it’s going to take twelve hours.”
240
241“Twelve hours could include time they’re asleep, or busy with other things,” the smaller man says.
242
243“The game tells them they can pay a hundred and twenty paws to hurry.”
244
245“How much is that in dollars?”
246
247“That’s about nine dollars and sixty-eight cents,” I said.
248
249“Will they pay that much?”
250
251“Probably not,” the smaller man said, with no melodrama in his voice.
252
253He clicked his Macbook Pro’s trackpad. The next slide was a graph.
254
255“Tap Pet Shop launched as a free app. It made zero dollars for its first three days of availability. On day four, it made $10,000.”
256
257The larger man was still standing up. He put his hands on the table. “If you engage the player for a day, you engage the player for three days.”
258
259“If you engage the player for three days, you will possibly engage the player for a month.”
260
261“If you engage the player for a month, chances are you have engaged the player for three months.”
262
263“If you engage the player for three days — chances are the player will spend a dollar.”
264
265“If you engage the player for a week, twenty-five percent of the time he will spend ten dollars.”
266
267“This is all backed by research.”
268
269A silence. Now the larger man pointed at me. “He’s run all the numbers on our product.”
270
271The older men looked at me.
272
273“I’ve run them all,” I said.
274
275“It’s totally solid,” the larger man said.
276
277“It’s solid like a rock,” I said.
278
279“It’s unsinkable,” the smaller man said.
280
281“It’s an unsinkable rock. An unsinkable, solid rock.”
282
283An older man looked at me.
284
285“And it’s not about a pet shop that doesn’t sell pets?”
286
287“We’re using a different metaphor,” the smaller man said. Then he sniffed: hay fever.
288
289“It’s the same game, though, as this thing?” the older man said.
290
291“Yes,” I said.
292
293“More or less,” the larger man said.
294
295“Except we’re using a different metaphor.”
296
297Silence fell, a bowling ball onto the middle of the meeting table.
298
299The older man cleared his throat, and then: “Let’s see the sales numbers for that pet shop game.”
300
301chapter three: engagement wheels and compulsion traps
302(or, “different metaphors”)
303Every social game now uses a mechanic called “energy”.
304
305Energy is a devilish, sinister little fantastic idea.
306
307In a game with an “energy” mechanic, you need one energy point per profitable action. When you run out of energy, you can either pay money for more — usually you can fill your meter for two dollars — you can spam your Facebook friends’ walls and mailboxes, begging for more, or you can sit patiently and wait for the meter to recharge.
308
309As research for a game I was developing, I played the latest megalithic social game, The Sims Social, which is the product of Electronic Arts and Playfish dissecting each of Zynga’s sinister success stories and reverse-engineering their own, leaner, deadlier model.
310
311The Sims Social uses “energy” points. However, it also uses a dozen other currencies, all of them directly or indirectly converting into another (if not one another).
312
313I should note that, when I say “currencies”, I’m talking about more than just gold or coins or rupees or any other in-game money unit:
314
315Game design is about crafting a micro-economy. Even in an action game, every action the player or an enemy can perform is a stock or a bond or a unit of currency that can be traded for something else. As the screen scrolls from left to right, Super Mario Bros.’s market fluctuates. One fireball can buy one dead koopa. The points at the top of the screen can’t buy anything. Given enough time and a spreadsheet, I could tell you how many dead Goombas a Bowser fireball is worth.
316
317In Dragon Quest, it’s less obscure. Gold buys weapons. Weapons buy attack power upgrades. Attack power upgrades buy clearance for more attack power upgrades — through allowing the player’s rate of gold acquisition by allowing him to traverse a previously impassable tunnel and access a region of the world with stronger, richer monsters, in the vicinity of a town whose shop sells better weapons. At the end of the day, all you’re doing is buying bigger numbers. Armor is a currency which buys you an extra round of survival in a battle against a particular type of forest imp. Experience points buy you level-ups, which buy you marginally bigger numbers, which buy you time — accelerating the pace at which you approach the benchmark amount of gold needed to buy the next more powerful weapon or armor. In Dragon Quest, you’ll every so often reach a point where you have to decide between being able to survive longer or hit harder. It feels like an important choice, though “harder” is nearly always the right answer. The simple evidence for that is this game is unwinnable if you do not hit something every now and again. (This is algebraically sound.)
318
319What the “energy” mechanic does is limit the player’s time. This is how you know Zynga employed psychiatrists and psychologists and psychomathematicians in the honing of this concept: you give the player only a few moves at a time. The player uses all of these moves. Now he can’t play anymore, unless he:
320Pays some money
321Begs his friends
322Waits
323
324The first of these options leads to the game’s victory. The player has paid something, so the game wins. It takes the money, puts it in its pocket, tells the player his “kidnapped” daughter is already safe at home, and walks away.
325
326The second of these options leads to increased viral exposure of the game. Of course, this is incredibly effective. Remember: the “average” player who spends $1.70 is a Math Ghost. In order for these games to profit, they need to have as many players talking about it as possible. What better — and more brilliant! — way to get players to talk about a game than to make talking about the game a way to earn currency in the game? I’m sure we all know how brilliant a moneymaking idea this is. We can all agree that it’s sinister, though let’s stop for a second and reflect on how amazingly simple it is.
327
328(It used to be, people talked about a game when they enjoyed playing it. The businessmen whose arms may well be huge pairs of tweezers no doubt saw this and took away the information that “People talking about games leads to increased exposure of the game.” They failed to see — or conveniently ignored — that it was because the game was enjoyable, or interesting, that people talked about it. Now, they force you to talk about the game. Does that, then, make the game interesting? I’m not going to delve too deeply into the good things about social games, though I will say, with a sigh, that yes — yes, it does, ultimately, have just about the same effect as the game being interesting.)
329
330The final of these options is the one the psychomathematicians grinned most sinisterly about. The player who does not want to pay or scream must now wait. He can take some actions without expending energy — he can move his furniture around, or what have you — though he can’t do anything in the name of progress.
331
332The player who waits might not be paying because:
333
334He doesn’t like the game
335He isn’t sure if he understands the benefits of paying
336
337The player who waits might not be asking his friends for help because:
338
339He doesn’t like the game
340He has a sense of common decency
341
342Any time the player decides to wait for his energy meter to refill, he is (subconsciously) selecting two of these four possible reasons. In the case of “He doesn’t like the game” and “He doesn’t like the game”, the game is probably not going to get any of his money.
343
344In the case of “He doesn’t like the game” and “He has a sense of common decency”, this is where magic occurs.
345
346One click in one of these social games will take the user to the Real-World Money-Costing In-Game-Currency-Unit-Buying Shop. Here, the player will see that the game indeed offers him an option for paying $100 for something which is not real: an in-game currency with which to buy things in the game.
347
348At the time he makes the conscious decision to wait for his energy to refill, the player likely already knows that “micro”-transactions exist which have $100 price-tags. Now he learns how much energy costs — usually, it’s nowhere near $100, or even $10.
349
350Do players buy energy? What sorts of players buy energy? The short answer is: actual idiots. The long answer is: people who don’t understand why they have so much real-world money.
351
352In social games, energy doesn’t exist to be bought. It exists as an engagement-regulating filter. The player attaches to it some vague notion of “value”. Backward-like, he comes to associate waiting an hour in the real world before coming back to the game with “working” and “earning” the “value” of the thing the game is giving him for “free”.
353
354This isn’t exactly a truthful impression. The impression the player should take away — and gets confused about — is that in social games, time is a currency. Time is what you use to buy energy. Energy is a currency for purchasing in-game money, and some less-abstract in-game currencies (the premium in-game currency which the player must use real money to purchase) and more-abstract in-game currencies (namely virality and chance) can be used to purchase energy directly.
355
356Energy’s multiple conversion rates into multiple in-game currencies mystify the idea of time as a currency.
357
358The old idiom “time is money” has many meanings, you see.
359
360“Energy” is a money that literally directly represents time.
361
362Social game developers are scrambling knee-over-shoulder over one another, as of late, to implement The Next Energy. Concepts like Social Game Energy Points — much like Viral Marketing, masturbation, and caffeine — are the sort of thing that works for a while, until its flimsy veneer snaps off and the user blinks, and says, “Wait, what?” It’s a compulsion trap.
363
364So here’s what the geniuses at EA and Playfish came up with — and I’m not being snippy when I use the word “geniuses”. They really are geniuses.
365
366The Sims Social features a mechanic coldly entitled “inspiration”. “Inspiration” is a temporary state of euphoria during which your Sim earns 150% the money he usually earns from single-energy-point-costing in-game actions which yield money. “Inspiration” reflects your Sim’s stock on a good day, as it were.
367
368The “Inspired” status is, in bluntest terms, a currency-augmenting state purchased with two currencies. One of the currencies is “time”. The other is the most abstract social-game currency yet devised: “care”.
369
370If virality as a game currency were Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, this is the Mona Lisa.
371
372(Alternate sentence: “If virality as a game currency were some shrewd engineer’s attempt at creating a communication method more vapid than a Christmas card, this is a reinvention of waiting for the cable guy.”)
373
374The player appreciates the world of the game; if the player didn’t hold some small attachment to the world of the game, the player would have quit playing. Both “player” and “game” would henceforth semantically cease to exist.
375
376We talked above about how all of Zynga’s energy-point social games contain not-for-profit actions which can be performed without the expense of energy points. The line in the sand is clear: to get currency (in-game coins), one must use currency (energy, or real-world money) to perform action. If one performs an action which does not require currency, one will not receive currency.
377
378The Sims Social’s “inspiration” is a filter applied before the expense of currency which is then used to perform actions which, bluntly put, purchase a different currency.
379
380Here’s how it works: at the bottom of the screen are five buttons, representing the five Basic Needs of a Sim: Socialization, Hygiene, Food, Toilet, and Fun. These buttons start out a radiant primary green. As time passes, these buttons’ colors slip — in sometimes wildly randomized rates — from this tasty green to a lighter green, to yellow, to orange, to red, and eventually — very eventually — to black. When a need is red or black, the Sim will refuse to do anything except satisfy that need. (Needs become black if the Sim has just stood around not doing anything for a time.)
381
382To satisfy the need, click the button. Click the “Hygiene” icon and your Sim — regardless of the color of the need button — will trot off to the bathroom to either take a shower or wash his or her hands in the sink. Click on “Food” and your Sim will head to the kitchen to either eat from the refrigerator or heat something up in the microwave.
383
384If a need is any color other than primary green, doing a need-satisfying action will cause a bright green happy face icon to pop out of your Sim. Click on it to collect it — or, well, don’t click on it, and after a moment the game will collect it for you. (This is a crucially important element of the game.)
385
386The green happy face is a “mood” item, which increases the “mood” meter, a vertically oriented temperature gauge of sorts with a happy face at the top, located to the left of your “need” buttons.
387
388Getting all of the buttons to primary green will yield a maxxed “mood” meter, a big green happy face, a twinkling sound effect, a sparkly aura around your character, and the shining word “INSPIRED!” above the need buttons. “Earn more Simoleons!” it says, under “inspired”.
389
390Now you click on the nearest thing that you know will earn your money — the microwave, for example. You can earn 20 Simoleons every time you cook nachos. With the “inspired” bonus, you can earn thirty. You have been writing emails and talking on the phone over in The Realspace, so you have a Sims Social energy meter which is near-bursting turgid with fifteen energy points. You click that microwave, and you just start going to town on making those nachos.
391
392Here is where it should be noted that each action — be it a free-of-cost need-satisfying / mood-boosting action or an energy-point-costing currency-earning action — results in a series of cute character animations which play out over an average length of time of ten seconds.
393
394Ten little seconds! In, say, a first-person shooter, much of the math is accidental — inspired by game designer brain-sparks. The game designer is firing a gun, and says, “This should be a little faster.” So we head over to the spreadsheet and look at the numbers. The machinegun fires 18 rounds a second. We pump it up to 19. 19 — a weird little prime number. Somehow, it feels better.
395
396With a social game, you can tell where they’re starting. I have reverse-compiled a game design balance sheet for The Sims Social, and I will tell you all about it, if you’ll read my review on Action Button Dot Net, though for now I’ll only say that where an action game is home to many sixes and nineteens, in social games you find a lot of fives and tens.
397
398Let’s not dwell on what that means (just yet).
399
400It takes ten seconds to perform an action — once your Sim has approached the object he will use to perform the action (toilet, microwave). You’ll need to perform five actions — at least — to max your mood meter. Your Sim might have to walk back and forth across the house five times to perform all those actions. When you boil The Sims Social down to its essence, this is “The Fun Part”: watching Cartoon You (or Cartoon Bill Cosby) walk around inside your happy little home. Sometimes, something breaks before you can use it, and your Sim gets frustrated. You can either fix it (one energy point), or you can use an alternative (instead of the microwave, head to the refrigerator to satisfy hunger).
401
402Once your mood meter is full and you’re inspired, it’s time to make money. Each money-making action takes five seconds. By now, this software product (“game”) has firmly hooked you.
403
404Crucial: you can only queue up five actions at a time. (This is not Starcraft.)
405
406You have fifteen energy points. If you tab away from The Sims Social to check your email during a cycle of five actions, maybe the microwave will break in the middle of your nacho-frenzy. You’ll come back to see only two of five actions were completed: he’s not going to fix the microwave automatically.
407
408Or maybe you’ll plug in and watch ten actions go without a hitch. That’s a hundred seconds of your life evaporated painlessly. Then you’ll plug in the last five actions and tab away. You’ll come back to see you have four energy points left, the microwave is broken, and your inspiration has worn off. Next time, you’ll be more careful.
409
410So here we are, playing video poker in a bar by the highway a decade after the nukes drop and everyone is dead and “money” is just a ghost like anyone else’s dead grandpa.
411
412The idea, here, is that The Sims Social is rife with sticky walls and mental fly-paper, trying to keep you staring at the world until you become so accustomed to its face it’s the same as being in love: you’re staring at your guy making nachos, or writing blog posts, because the game has attached this mammoth importance to making more money, to moving up in the world, to buying new furniture, and here it is giving you a fifty-percent bonus. You’re trapped, whether you’re actively “enjoying” yourself or not. You’re “doing it correctly”, and the game is rewarding you, and it’s easier than pressing the right buttons with the right timing in Rock Band, and all it required was a little sleight-of-brain. You feel good about yourself. You look at this cartoon world long enough, and something of an Inverse Pavlov happens. Your brain begins to know that you are “enjoying” yourself, even if you hate this insipid thing. In spite of a love-shaped hole in the center of your spirit re: this electronic monster, you will not turn away.
413
414The game is a Chinese finger trap of the mind: soon you realize that inspiration is free, which, in economics terms, means that the inflated value of single-energy-point actions when “inspired” is not a “bonus” or a “maximum” value — it’s the baseline; it’s the “minimum”. Once you grasp that your character can be made inspired with a little flick of the game’s mechanics, you’ll never want to do money-earning actions without being inspired — and if you do (and this is the important part!) you’ll feel lazy.
415
416Lazy! Lazy! Stupid! Lazy! (Fat!) Lazy! Stupid! Lazy!
417
418So you’ll need four “newspapers” to “unlock” your “newspaper article” writing skill, which allows you to now use energy points to perform actions which earn money (while “inspired”, of course, so as not to feel lazy); perform those actions on a new skill enough times to earn a one-time skill level upgrade, which earns experience points and a money bonus — and so you realize you are literally (figuratively) living in a spider web. The currency which buys the “newspapers” to unlock your new skill-level-upgrade opportunity is, of course, virality: beg your friends.
419
420Your friends all have newspapers. They have ice cubes and coffee beans and blocks of cheese and turnip seeds and guitar strings and sheet music and turtle-doves as well: they have whatever you need. They have it even if they aren’t playing the game. However, unless you ask them for it, they can’t give it to you. Unless you ask them for it, they don’t Actually Have it. If they are at the point where they need “Muse” items to build a Fucking Bookshelf, and you’re at the exact same point, if you ask them for a “Muse”, they can give you one, even if they don’t have it. You can give them one, too, even if you don’t have it. This is what suffices for escapism: that we have the power to create ephemeral things with concrete value, which can then be bartered for a bookshelf which is fully assembled as opposed to on the floor in a box.
421
422In the future, three months will have passed, and you’ll still be checking in, from time to time, just to send items to your friends — all it takes is a single click in your inbox — and then maybe you’ll see that weeds have grown in your garden, and you’ll spend nine energy points to get rid of all of them, and then maybe by then you’ll have gotten a long- and good-enough look at your old homestead to consider coming back, and maybe spending a little money, this time.
423
424In other words: we play, so that our friends are not miserable. We suffer, so that others might not suffer. We pay money so that we might suffer less.
425
426What gruesome psychomathematiconomist devised this heart-labyrinth? Or: now you know what happens to psychiatrists who are decommissioned because they break the doctor-patient confidentiality rule.
427
428chapter four: the phantom who loved itself
429
430The Sims Social is as sharp a computer tool as the blacksmiths in Silicon Valley have yet forged. It’s not a Tamagotchi — it’s a mini-us (or a mini-otherperson). That’s always been the appeal of The Sims: look at the little people inside the screen, there. Now it’s been skin-grafted onto Facebook’s thigh, where it coddles our narcissism — we all have narcissism (it’s all over us like bacteria) — and massages our brains.
431
432The Sims Social is a game about sitting around in your house, playing the computer. The Sims Social is “The Life and Times of Everybody Tweezerhands”.
433
434I’ve had a good think about it — and about The Modern Culture, and of the Global Financial Crisis, and I realize it’s all the same thing. It’s all one big bloody, messy thing. I’ve got my hands in it up to the elbows. I’ve got my forearms in it. I’ve got my forearms in it, and it’s paying my rent.
435
436When I think of trying to conclude this essay, all I can remember is The Smaller Man and The Larger Man. They’re Stanford men; they wear suits well. They’re several years younger than I am. They look several years older than I am. They’re the swim-team-captain-looking sort of strait-laced white-teethed all-American Caucasians who will someday make a real woman genuinely happy, who send their mothers flowers on Mother’s Day. Even if I hadn’t seen their Facebook pages and knew what I was about to say was a fact, I’d theorize that they probably have photos on their Facebook pages of themselves in Nigeria or Namibia or Kenya or some other African country whose name instantly screams “Africa” to the modern know-something world-citizen. These country names scream “Africa”, and “Africa” screams “poverty” and “poverty” screams “adventure”. Here’s this guy, playing Modern Day Indiana Jones, his shirt off, a bandanna on his head, a grinning child with a rice bowl at a wooden table, cracked earth behind him. Here’s another photo: he’s lending a hand in building a house, one of those unmistakably “African” trees, all bent and ghosty, popping up out of the crackled reddish earth behind him. He’s got a not-clean towel wedged in the back of his shorts; his bare torso is gleaming with sweat, his tan the color of a roast turkey. His mouth-shape is halfway between joy and irritation — he’s maybe three mood-drops from “inspired”. Get to know him for real, and you’ll see that he was there for a week. Here I am, not building any houses for anybody, at my office in a loft in a sparkling old warehouse — a hipster hovel somewhere near Pixar, in Oakland, California — masterminding two virtual clinical trials for electronic drugs.
437
438The Modern Day Indiana Jones is shrewd, and can go the distance in a pitch meeting. Apparently Zynga has a “bible” of game concepts that will grab inhumane amounts of money, which they will pump into games of increasing complexity. Like Nintendo with the DS, Zynga is inviting a new audience. They are “teaching” a game-ignorant demographic how to play games, by starting with flat-as-a-board exercises (Farmville) in possibly-endless repetition of the most minute game actions (collecting things, numbers going up). Their games grow increasingly labyrinthine (Frontierville, Cityville), introducing game-genre tropes which are “monetized” effectively. Eventually, they have a game that plays something like a real game — Adventure World — and the micro-transactions are waning. Zynga may yet prove to be a not-evil enterprise. However, if we can calculate a man’s height from his footprint in the sand, we can predict that Zynga has already done evil by perpetuating flimsy game models which are mere sugar-coating for a bitter pill of “Show Us The Money”. The modern videogame development is a mathematician’s paradise, where getting the customers addicted is as easy now as downloading pirated music in 1997. As the weapons in the war on the customer’s credit card get sharper (The Sims Social), how can we not say that we might be headed for a crash? When will Fox News step in and proclaim these videogames as monstrously addictive twisted electro-creatures?
439
440An ex-drug-dealer (now a video game industry powerbrain) once told me that he doesn’t understand why people buy heroin. The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly.
441
442Is it possible to sell a social game the way a weed dealer sells weed? I say, at the end of the day, any game we play which inspires us to talk about it is a “social” game. Like it or not, even alone, we represent a “part of society”. Everything we do is “social”. Just as speaking of “monetization” indicates that you are putting up the illusion of “free” and devising ways the player will pay anyway, calling an activity a “social” activity is a shining clue that all you’re really trying to do is make money with it. You’d figure that would scare away your audience.
443
444One of my favorite stories from the 1,001 Nights is of the fisherman who finds a corked bottle in his fishing net. Maybe that’s not entirely clear — there are literally a hundred variations on this story within the Nights. The one I’m talking about is where the man uncorks the bottle and the genie threatens to kill him.
445
446The genie was trapped in that bottle for 1,800 years. For the first hundred years, he swore he would grant a wish to whoever freed him. For the next hundred, he swore to God he would grant two wishes. A hundred years later, he was praying to God every day, promising he would grant three wishes. A hundred years later — and for fifteen-hundred long years — every day he cursed God through his teeth and promised he would kill whoever freed him.
447
448The lowly fisherman, with a sudden spark of shrewdness, convinces the genie that it would be proper to not kill an innocent man without answering a simple question. The genie obliges: the question is this: how did the genie fit in the bottle? The answer is that he can bend space and time readily; the fisherman asks for a demonstration. The genie returns to the bottle. The fisherman corks it.
449
450Now the genie begs and pleads. He offers ten wishes, a hundred wishes. The fisherman says he does not trust the genie. The fisherman promises he will throw the bottle back into the water. Then he will erect a fence around the lake. He will warn all fishermen about the genie. He will put up signs saying not to trust the genie in the bottle at the bottom of this lake.
451
452The genie begs and pleads. He prays to God. The fisherman does not listen. He urges the fisherman to tell the whole story. He says that he should let other fisherman judge for themselves whether they should believe that the genie is purely evil. The genie implores the fisherman to tell others how he begged, and of the wondrous offers he made, because only now has he truly repented. The fisherman sees this final wheedle as another sinister plot — as the most perverse type of subversion. He tells the genie he will in fact tell the whole story, including the part about his own suspicion that these final words of the genie are just yet another sinister plot. He casts the bottle back into the lake and does exactly as he said he would do.
453
454We never find out what happens to the bottle. We don’t have to: it’s an idea buried in the collective subconscious, that somewhere there is a magical evil that, possessive of whimsy, depending on its mood may in an act of defiant kindness elect to give one person great power.
455
456The 1,001 Arabian Nights are a kind of Russian stacking doll — stories inside stories inside stories outside of other stories, all surrounded by one big story — and so are their themes. Finally, The 1,001 Arabian Nights are surrounded by the real world — the world which has created the story of a girl telling stories about people telling stories. The genie in the bottle at the bottom of the lake is, in fact, a metaphor for the person (maybe us) who would find that bottle and, heeding the warnings, knowing the legend, set the genie free. What wishes will they make? Will they wish for world peace, or for endless wealth with which to buy influence with which to assemble an army with which to smite their enemies?
457
458People are dying as we play Farmville and update Twitter — and not just in Africa or Cambodia. They are dying everywhere, and they don’t feel very good at all about it. The world is the size of a phone booth, thanks to technology. One man’s cancer cure is another man’s Sims Social airtight engagement wheel.
459
460Here’s the ending of this piece:
461
462The other day, a friend sat across from me at a Chinese restaurant in downtown Oakland, California. He said there’s this girl he likes. He met her on the internet. They’re Facebook friends and they follow each other on Twitter. They’ve hung out twice or thrice a week for a month.
463
464He reminds me that he is not the “type of person” to “actually like” someone. He has never wanted a “girlfriend”. He asks me my opinion as a metaphorically-knife-wielding game-mathematician.
465
466“What should I do?”
467
468“Just text her right now. Ask, ‘Hey, do you want to be my girlfriend?’”
469
470He groans. “I already know she does.”
471
472“Make a move, then.”
473
474“The opportunity never presents itself.”
475
476He tells me that they hang out at shows, or with People She Knows or People He Knows, at bars. He says that, half the time, he thinks he knows what she’s thinking, and that half the time, he thinks he doesn’t know what she’s thinking.
477
478“We have little psychic duels,” he says. “We see how long we can go without texting each other. We’ll text each other back and forth for like an hour–”
479
480“–yeah, I noticed,” I say.
481
482“Yeah, we’ll just keep texting back and forth. And it’s like — a duel to see who doesn’t get the last word. The last word means we’re more interested in actively pursuing the conversation, which means we like the other person more, which means we’re losing. I was thinking about it, and I was thinking about that thing you were talking about — that game you were working on — and I think maybe it’s the same thing.”
483
484“It’s similar,” I say.
485
486I thought about the girl who had recently sent me a message on OKCupid.com. Yes, I have an OKCupid.com profile. These days, that’s at least as normal as being on Facebook or Twitter. Okay — maybe not. Maybe it’s about as normal as playing “Words With Friends”. Some girl messaged me. She said I seemed hilarious. She said she really liked my sense of humor. I wasn’t attracted to her in the least. She asked if I had a blog, and I showed her my blog. She asked if I had a Facebook, and I showed her my Facebook.
487
488On Facebook, I happen to be listed as “In a domestic partnership” with a wonderful lady who lives in Australia — about as far around the world as you can get before you’re on your way back. This girl friended me on Facebook and immediately sent me a message. “You didn’t say on your OKCupid profile that you live with your girlfriend.” I said, “That’s a joke.” She said, “Then change it.” I said, “No; it’s funny.” She said, “I’m not sure I want to talk with you if you’re not willing to change it.” I said, “First of all, graphically, thou art a beast. Second of all, how you gonna go making demands on someone you just e-met thirty seconds ago.”
489
490Back in the present, I let out a “Hmm”.
491
492“So you and this girl are both mentally tough people who know what you want, more or less, and you each respect the other enough to not want the other to respect you less than you respect them.”
493
494“Yeah.”
495
496“It’s ‘mind games’, eh?” I say. “Most girls’ profiles on OKCupid.com say to ‘message me if’ ‘you don’t play games’. Sometimes, I want to message, asking ‘do you mean mind games, or videogames?’ Because I think I hate both equally, and play both about as often, though always by accident.”
497
498“Huh. And the other thing — once The Last Word has happened, and there’s Radio Silence for a while, usually it’s the person who didn’t get the last word’s responsibility to text next, usually giving an excuse — though never leaning on the excuse. ‘I just had to drive all the way to–’ wherever.”
499
500“Who most often gets the last word?”
501
502“Usually it’s her. Sometimes it’s me.”
503
504“So it’s usually you who reboots the conversation?”
505
506“No — no, actually. Usually it’s her.”
507
508I thought it over. I finished my vegetables — every last one of them (completion bonus). I gulped some water.
509
510“The next time she texts after a conversation has lapsed with her getting the last word,” I say, “text her back immediately — if you see the text as it arrives.”
511
512“That’s usually what I do.”
513
514“Well, here’s what I mean: no matter what time of day or night it is, text her back immediately with ‘Do you want to hang out right now?’”
515
516My friend is silent for thirty seconds.
517
518“Huh,” he finally says. He is silent again. “Huh.”
519
520He’s silent for a minute.
521
522“Huh. Man. You’re, like . . . fuckin’ . . . Sherlock Holmes, over here.”
523
524“Yes,” I say. “Yes I am.” Yes I am Sherlock Holmes.
525
526who killed videogames?
527To put it most bluntly — and this is only a theory — videogames killed videogames. As is often the case with this kind of senseless cold-blooded murder, the finger on the trigger belonged to a videogame-psychosis born of the worst qualities of game design. They are the qualities most ready to be studied: that players like (maybe-)you or me can’t progress to the next dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past unless we’re going in with 999 rupees; if we don’t have 999 rupees, we are going to go to the nearest cluster of bushes and hack them down until we do. When a psychiatrist looks at videogames, he’s not going to appreciate the fineness of the sprite art; he’s going to find the elements that get stuck in the brain. We’re all Stockholm-syndromed, halfway in love with videogames; we grew up learning that videogames were awesome, and the makers of the most awesome of all games grew old constantly trying to “recapture” the “roots” of their former glory. The thing is one thing can affect a million people a billion different ways. You can’t trace glory back to one root. So through sequels and remakes and demakes and remakuels demakuels and reboots and rebooquels, time and again, the makers of games presume that each element of a thing is some different someone’s favorite part of that thing. The hardcore gamers, in their fondest appreciation, have left clues littered here and everywhere, pointing even the most uninitiated toward the universal facets of electronic games that most directly touch our brains — that here are things whose chief criticism is that they are “repetitive” and “anti-social” gives the clever people the idea to remedy one thing while amplifying the other. Some clever people picked up the trail . . . and a few years later, here we are, each of us a different kleptomaniac in a different candy shop. God help us; Shigeru Miyamoto help us all.
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529—tim rogers