FrontierVille - Evolution of Social Games?

There’s been much hulabaloo about Zynga and Facebook social games. Much of the friction is between those that develop these social games and the traditional game developers. Game developers claim that games such as Mafia Wars and Farmville are unethical as they exploit their user base using techniques that are based upon metrics and psychology.



In plain English, it means these games artificially force users to constantly come back to them and exploit users psychological weakness(to make a quick buck). Which gets me to FrontierVille and Brian Reynolds. You see, Brian Reynolds made three of my favourite games of all time(Civ 2, Rise of Nations, and Rise of Legends) and when I heard he was leaving Big Huge Games to work with Zynga, I was shocked. Now that FrontierVille has gone live, I took it for a spin to see if Brian Reynolds added gameplay depth to this genre of games. Is this the Facebook game that we've been waiting for?

This Ain’t No WoW

In essence, still FarmVille

FrontierVille takes very much the same concept of all other farming games, planting crops and harvesting them. Or as Brian Reynolds put it "pushing back the wilderness" and "taming the land". It adds a dash of new gameplay mechanics to it such as quests systems to give FrontierVille its own flavour. It is essentially, still Farmville but I could see where the gameplay mechanics came in. Imagine the experience system of an MMORPG or an RPG, and diluting the leveling mechanic to its bear essence. Leveling up has no real meaning in terms of gameplay and the game remains the same. You’d still have to grind for resources to buy new things that might give you new gameplay options(most of them don’t). 

On top of this simple experience/leveling system, Frontiervilles also introduced the concept of objectives. You’re now constantly reminded on the next thing to do. Fulfill the objectives and get some bonus goodies. And from time to time, you’ll be given the option of accepting certain quests. Find the lost sheep, or look for the snake. Objectives and quests do give the game more direction than its predecessors but it’s hampered by very shallow gameplay.

 

Click As Fast and As Much As You Can

FrontierVille, like its previous iterations, is also a game about clicks. Ian Bogost did an excellent parody/social experiment of this called cow clicker. The results were depressing. He found out that, yes, a lot of people find clicking a cow compelling enough to spend their time and money on the game. In FrontierVille, users are rewarded for clicking on almost anything on the screen. And the most ironic thing is that some of these ‘reward items’ you get do absolutely nothing. They just add up to this gallery of junk you get that serves as a trophy rooms of sorts I suppose. To quote the games description of the bonus bar:

Fill this bar to gain extra coins. The faster you click on icons that appear when you harvest, the better!

Spend Time Waiting For Crops To Grow

Make sure to log back in in a few hours time or your crops will  go bad

Energy, gold, wood, and horseshoes are resources you can get in Frontierville. Energy is really important as it limits just how many task you can do. Each thing you do in the game environment(from chopping wood to clearing the brushes) takes 1 unit of energy away. When you reach 0, you’ll have to replenish energy by eating food that you have to buy.

You use Horseshoes to buy many of the food that replenish the most amount of energy and, you guessed it, horseshoes are the in game micro transactions. You pay real money to get them. Or you can grind real minutes to wait for your energy to replenish. You get 1 energy every 5 minutes(or something close to that). There are the usual premium items that serves no other purpose than to gloat to your friends that you get using horseshoes.

In an article on Gamespot, Sid Meier had this to say:

"I think that's just the wrong word," Meier said. "It's fun to play. As game designers, we want to make an experience that you want to continue to play and play again and replay. So I'm hesitant to make that a bad thing: that games that are fun, that games are things you want to do, that you want to keep doing. Because that's our goal: to create a great experience. I just want to be careful that we don't make [it] a negative that games are too good. 'They're too much fun, they're too compelling!' Games should be fun. They should be compelling. They should make you want to play."

However what I found was that games like FrontierVille and its previous iterations and copycats require users to constantly log in to tend to their farm. In real time! Which means small things like waiting for your energy to refill (this is just cruel). And of course, your crops will bear fruit in a few hours(I don’t know the exact time). If there is one thing I hate about these social games it is this. I don’t play my favourite games every hour of the day god damn it!

Which really raises the question. Is this too much? I wonder if using terms like exploitative and manipulating are apt for these games. Or is it an over exaggeration from a generation of gamers that are used to the old model of ‘games’? Is it perfectly all right to consider these design mechanics simply because people say they are having fun? Or do designers have a responsibility of drawing a line on what’s good and what’s not? This aren’t easy questions to answer.

Tycoon games have done these(requiring players to nurture a business or a farm etc) before by using an in game timer that you can accelerate or decelerate at your own will. I think this could be applied to Facebook games as well however the whole design idea of these current crop(no pun intended) of Facebook farming games is to get players to login to the game as often as possible. It's part of their metric to determine a 'successful' game.

If people are having fun, they wouldn’t need an artificial mechanic like this to get them to play the game again. It is quite clear to me that the entire mechanic to draw players in as often as possible is a very web centric approach(that these social game designers look at such statistics as play frequency per day akin to visits per day for a website). Is this the right approach to take?

 

What’s My Motivation Here?

Anyway, I digress. There’s also this constant nagging to invite your friends to be a neighbour, or ask your friends for help or invite them over to your farm. This I suppose is the ‘social’ aspect of social games. The thing with social games is that they don’t necessarily deserve the title, as traditional games are beginning to take advantage of online communities and features that connect gamers together. I think they are called social games mostly because of the fact that they are on a social network platform rather than game design that 'promotes' social elements.

I don’t see how Frontierville is more social than World of Warcraft(which I supposed some people can play solo). I’m far more impressed with games like Left 4 Dead or Team Fortress 2 with how they encourage players to cooperate to play better(again, way more social). In these Farming games, players are forced to cooperate for very selfish reasons, earn energy, or food, or some mysterious reward for inviting friends or spamming them with messages. What’s the motivation here?

Which has been the overwhelming question I’ve asked myself playing through FrontierVille. What’s my motivation to continue playing this? What’s my motivation to invite a friend? Or to send them a message about daily meals? Other than the visual pleasure of seeing your frontier or farm advance with new stuff or the useless rewards that serve no purpose. I guess it’s a sort of oxymoron to say that these games are kind off shallow and are not fulfilling. I mean, what real rewards do other games offer?

But then I think back to those awesome moments in Civilization V or AI War or all those awesome after action reports from Europa Universalis III, I think to myself, you know what, games could indeed offer a lot more. Whether it’s through emergent dynamics, simulation, sheer depth of gameplay, or a compelling scripted narrative, games could find new ways to engage us. And they often have. FrontierVille is unfortunately still the lowest common denominator of what I would call 'games' for now.

FrontierVille and essentially most of the Zynga’s model of social gaming may not be for me but it doesn’t mean I can’t offer my critique of it. It has issues that I find a bit too difficult for me to get over. Of course Zynga claims that these games are for non gamers, people that may not be familiar with gaming. But are these the type of experiences we want to sell to them as their first gaming experience?

Addendum: Since the writing of this article, Zynga has released CityVille, their biggest launch to date. 290,000 users in 24 hours. Does it offer something new gameplay wise? I don't know. Have you tried it?