Farmville Killed Gaming, V-Worlds, Dogs

The battle lines are being drawn between “social games” and traditional gaming, and the rhetoric is getting bloody. Today, MMORPG.com columnnist Scott Jennings takes a look at the issue.

Looking back at my wrapup of 2009, it does seem as though, three months in, we’re in danger of repeating ourselves. After all, we have Activision Blizzard’s Bobby Kotick asserting his particular brand of fear and loathing with one of his most popular studios, and now it seems the talk of GDC 2010 was… Farmville. Specifically, how metrics-driven game design (such as what Farmville uses) will destroy fun as we know it.

"You want to make an intrinsically interesting game," he said of game designers at large. "[When] you add extrinsic motivators to make your game better, if these studies do apply to games, you're destroying intrinsic motivation to play your game."

"The game industry used to use no metrics whatsoever," he continued. "Everything was gut and by the seat of our pants. Then metrics came around, and [now] we're addicted to metrics. If I change a value of my purple hat, fourteen more people buy it, and we think we're totally in the zone."

Read Farmville Killed Gaming, V-Worlds, And Your Dog.