It's amazing when you realize that the world you live in is much larger than you once believed. Infants only know the places they are guided to by their mother and father until they are able to walk, for instance. As they develop, they learn that life contains things much more exciting than eating, sleeping, and pooping. At LOGIN 2010, I learned how much larger my world, the world of gaming, really was.
LOGIN is a business conference for game developers focusing on online and social games. Knowing several attendees I admire were going to be speaking, I volunteered to help with the event and get in for free. The main topic that everyone was talking about was developing browser-based MMOs and social games; both of the are admittedly not something I find myself playing. This, however, made me realize something else entirely. I'm not the core gaming demographic; my mother is.
Social games (like FarmVille) are designed to be played in short bursts over a long period of time. Players only need five minutes of time to plant crops and touch-up their farms; then they wait several hours before coming back to harvest the crops. If they don't harvest their crops, they will die. This is the only negative thing that happens in FarmVille. After the crops have withered, players can hoe the
FarmVille is a very long game. It takes people months to get enough money and FarmVille bucks in order to buy larger farms. Players can elect to purchase more FarmVille bucks in order to hasten progress in the game. This method is called microtransactions and it is why Zynga, the makers of FarmVille, are freaking rich.
LOGIN 2010 showed me the power of both social games and games from before my time. I met programmers who were coding on the APPLE II. After hearing countless praise by Brenda Brathwaite and John Romero (who both spent the weekend calling me "that guy"), I'm now spending most of my gaming time playing Wizardry; released in 1983. I'm also looking at games on Facebook.
If anyone is a fan of video games, they must broaden their horizons. There's a world beyond home consoles and World of Warcraft. There are thousands of developers working on incredibly innovative games on a small budget. Many of these games are more polished than most retail titles; and they don't cost sixty dollars. Beyond video games, play board games with friends. Get a group together to play Settlers of Catan or Carcasonne every month. People need to explore and appreciate games in order to be well-rounded human beings. Games are a paramount component of happiness.
This will be my last column for The Current, but I will keep on writing about games in any available space. I have both a personal blog and several sites where I write mainstream gaming news. It's s shameless bump, but find me at www.alexanderbevier.tumblr.com.
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