Are you a progressive or conservative on the game industry?

There is a raging debate in video games about social gaming. The success of Farmville and other social games have many in the traditional game industry angry and upset. Tempers have flared about whether social game designers have any morals, questioning if creators have any interest in bringing joy, and whether they are trying to advance the medium at all or just fleecing players. Soren wrote a great rundown in Fear and Loathing in Farmville about how this came to a head at the Game Developers Conference a few weeks ago. 

This smacks to me of a very typical debate between progressives and conservatives.

Conservatives want to perserve the status quo, feel scared that change is going to destroy the ethical underpinnings that have so carefully constructed, and tend to focus on the negative aspects of that change versus seeing it as a process. “They have no moral center!” they cry.

Progressives tend to feel that any change is better than stasis, that whatever problems exist will get worked out over time, and the current system was too broken to worry about preserving anyway. “We have found a better way,” they cry.

In life, I generally find myself on the side of progressives, and I do here as well. That said, there is a long discipline of game design knowledge and we should be careful of throwing out the baby with the bath water. We have found metrics can make a real substantial difference in game design and its evolution, but they can’t tell you what to do, only measure what you have done. And while Farmville does seem borderline exploitative at times, I also am amazed at how quickly the industry has evolved. Just two years ago a “game” on Facebook was a Scrabble knockoff and Vampires, which was a glorified poking application. It also is interesting to hear traditionally gamers decrying social games as the perfect skinner box when traditional media has been throwing the “addicting” label on traditional games for 30 years now.

Farmville in the years to come will look like PacMac does now, something those players loved at the time but feels antiquated compared to how far social games have come since then. That kind of rapid evolution and change excites me, and is something we are happy to contribute to.