I meant to go to sleep after my last post, but it started a lot of thoughts tumbling around. I eventually fell unconscious after writing the first eight paragraphs. Then I had to get up and keep writing and thinking. I never finished, but this is a blog, not a magazine, so I felt I needed to post this stuff and work on refining in subsequent posts. I knew gaming was changing, but I thought it was just making multiplayer a little more convenient; adding some cute but ultimately pointless stats. Now I'm beginning to think there are bigger things afoot.
Cheapy D and Wombat recently asked all CAGcast listeners to join the CAG group on facebook. I made a MySpace page (which I never visit) because theatre folks asked me to, and I figured facebook would be the same thing. It wasn't.
The big difference was the "news". It tells me when anyone I know does anything. Wombat's baby is home now. Someone (it says her name) who knew Cheapy in school added him to her profile using the classmate search feature. Ed (a theatre person who added me almost immediately) has an iPhone. These feel like things I shouldn't know, making them irresistable.
Every time someone I know makes a friend, I know it. Every time they take a survey, I know it (and am invited to take the same survey to see how well our results match up). Every time they decide there's a movie they want to see, I know it. I feel like I have a better idea about what's going on in these people's lives than I do in the lives of people I actually spend time with.
And I'm compelled to keep up with it. What are they doing today? What's new? I'm compelled, but at the end of the day, none of it matters to me. I might ask Ed how he likes his iPhone, or what he thinks about Dr. Horrible (since he just joined the fan club for it as I was typing this). But outside of that shallow exchange, it's mostly just novelty and voyeurism with no quality or substance.
And at some level I also feel that this is big business co-opting normal human interaction. Every page is serving ads and collecting data, while the content is largely provided by the users. Is it just me or is that kind of wrong?
Then I look at games like Little Big Planet and think it could be the same thing. There could be stats delivered on what levels your friends have played (including if they did it better or worse than you), what new items they've unlocked; what content they created or bought. It's like 360 achievements, or PS3 trophies, or WoW's armory, only way better because the users create the new levels and items for you. And once a game like that (maybe LBP, maybe a successor) gets integrated into a full social network like facebook, it's over. You think I'm just being dramatic, but hear me out.
Nintendo sells Wii Sports machines. There are a few million gamers out there who bought Mario Galaxy or Super Smash Brothers Brawl. But there's what, two Wiis without a copy of Galaxy for every Wii with one? That ratio isn't improving, either. People are buying the Wii to play Wii Sports.
If Sony can hook people on an endless stream of content, made shiny by novelty and social instincts, the PS3 becomes a LBP machine (plus an internet movie & TV service, plus a Blu Ray player). Get the price down to a level average consumers can afford, and the world is yours. Seriously, video rental stores and cable and satellite TV providers were already concerned about NetFlix. Now Sony and Microsoft are both selling set top boxes, piping movies and TV over the internet. No wonder Sony's so "generously" upping the storage on the PS3. If you only buy $4 worth of programming because of the extra space, they've instantly made that money back.
Jonathon Blow gave a presentation called Design Reboot. I only read what other people took away from it, so I don't know everything he said, but I do know that he discussed the insidious power of WoW to keep people addicted to shiny fake things. I'm sure I'm just overblowing the threat because all the ideas are new and scary to me, but I see combining this with user created content and facebook friend tracking as something of an apocalypse.
If every time I friended someone in WoW, it kept me updated on all the quests they completed, all the new gear they were picking up, and all the PvP rewards they were getting, that would be bad enough. But what if it was actually integrated into something like facebook, so I'd also be finding out about their tastes in movies, music, etc. "This guy I met in WoW turned me on to this great nerdcore rapper and this awesome Japanese DS game I never heard of."
This sort of thing already happens with chatty people, but automating it takes it to a new level. First off, some people don't like chatty people, but when they can feel like they're spying on them, will spend hours online doing so. Second, that information is always available, so the chatty people don't have to even be online. Third, even people who aren't chatty but have interesting tastes will become more interesting because that fact won't have to be pulled out of them in awkward conversation.
I'm still confused about this because I'm trying to tackle new, complicated ideas here. So I'll just spit out some random bullet points and wrap up for now.
I'm new to social networking, but it's power is obvious.
Ever since arcade games had high scores, competitive social interaction has been a key part of games.
Ever since MUDs, user created content has also been a driving force for a much smaller population.
Services like Steam Friends and Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network seem to be putting gaming into a social networking context.
Adding these things together, marketers don't even have to ask us what we want, then sell it to us. We make the products and sell it to ourselves, while they take a percentage.
Addiction to novelty, addiction to appearing well informed, and addiction to consuming seem to be driving forces here. As someone who scans a few hundred items from gaming news RSS feeds daily, I think I know something about these things. Oy.
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