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LOS
ANGELES — All it took was a single click on a
friend’s Facebook post. With it, Lana Sumpter — a
Tennessee university professor — began a three-year
habit that has consumed many late night hours and cost
many thousands of dollars.
The game
was Mafia Wars, created in 2008 by up-and-coming
developer Zynga Inc., now the largest player in the $1
billion-a-year social games genre. Its CityVille and
FarmVille draw more than 148 million players every month
to their Facebook sites. Like Sumpter, many of them come
day after day, using credit cards or gift cards to
“play, pay and share” the game, said Nicole Lazzaro,
founder of XEODesign and a consultant on the role of
emotion in games.
Some time
in the next two weeks Zynga will launch CastleVille, a
“Princess Bride” meets “Tangled” game in which
players build castles, encounter oddball fairy tale
characters, encourage them to become loyal subjects,
then try to conquer the Gloom, a mysterious force that
has spread sadness throughout the kingdom.
“Come
to a land where happiness rules,” beckons one of the
game’s advertisements.
Online is
where social gaming rules. Analysts of the genre say
these games appeal at an almost addictive level to basic
human instincts for companionship, generosity and
competitiveness. On Facebook, the online gaming
community includes 750 million active users.
CastleVille
is Zynga’s most ambitious game to date, and represents
the company’s most sophisticated attempt to hook in
players, get them to recruit their Facebook friends and
add to the community of online Zynga players.
Appealing
innovations include “gifting,” which enables players
to present their friends with a tree to decorate their
farm or a cow that makes milk, for example, and
“visiting,” which rewards players with experience
points and in-game currency for checking out their
friends’ kingdoms and helping out by harvesting crops
or stomping out “beasties.”
Gifting
and visiting don’t cost players any cash, but they do
accomplish key Zynga goals, according to analysts.
The
virtual gifts create a sense of abundance, Lazzaro said.
“People feel they can be generous, encouraging them to
give even more,” creating a never-ending cycle of
back-and-forth gift-giving that invites recipients to
come back to the game.
Visiting
draws on several basic emotions, including curiosity to
know what other players are building and sometimes envy
of what they build.
“It’s
just human nature to be curious about what my friends
value and care about,” said Bill Jackson, the game’s
creative director. And, suggested Lazzaro, “If I visit
your farm and I see that you have something that I
don’t, it can inspire me to try to get it too.”
CastleVille
and similar games also entice players by enabling them
to customize their online worlds.
Players
can select from hundreds of hairstyles, outfits,
costumes and body types to create their avatar, the
character that personifies the player in the game.
In some
Zynga games, these customizations cost money. In
CityVille, adding a “Pumpkin Palace” costs $6.25. On
CastleVille, adding a unicorn topiary costs fifteen
cents.
It’s a
trick many social games have used to get people to keep
coming back, said AJ Glasser, lead writer for Inside
Social Games, an industry newsletter.
“Whenever
players get to create and control a character, they tend
to invest a certain amount of themselves into the
game,” Glasser said. “It creates an emotional
connection between the player and the game.”
The
social component kicks in when players share their
creations, said Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s chief game
designer. “The big shift with social games is the fact
that you are now playing with your actual friends from
real life,” he said. “That’s where the magic comes
from. Our brains are wired to socialize.”
And
socialization is one of the components of happiness,
said Jason Brown, Zynga vice president of player
insight.
“Our
games tap into some fundamental drivers of human
happiness,” Brown said. “They give people moments of
pleasure (and) a sense of accomplishment. And they help
people connect with each other. One player proposed
marriage to another by spelling out ‘will you marry
me’ with the crops on his farm. Fortunately, she said
yes.”
Social
games also rely on scarcity to get people to come back,
sometimes several times a day. Otherwise known as “The
Cliffhanger,” this method deliberately frustrates the
player by preventing them from going further in the
game, often while they’re in the middle of a task.
Most
social games dole out a limited amount of energy that
players use each time they take an action. In
CastleVille, players may be fortifying their castles or
fighting a battle when they run out of “energy.” It
may take four to six hours for their “energy” to be
replenished. But the scarcity also encourages players to
act as marketing vehicles or to entice them to spend
real money. When a player runs out of energy, they are
prompted to send a request to their friends for a
donation or, better yet, to buy more energy to complete
the task.
Sumpter,
who declined to reveal her age, has spent as much as
$300 in a single day playing Mafia Wars, buying energy,
building up her character and collecting the virtual
weapons and items to advance in the game. A year ago,
she scaled back her spending to $100 a month.
What
keeps her playing, and spending, are the friends she’s
accumulated since she got into the game.
“We
chat on Skype during the game,” said Sumpter, who
belongs to a group of about 500 players that calls
itself AON, which stands for all or nothing. “It’s
funny, but we rarely chat about the game. We talk about
our lives. My car died on Monday, and people were
offering me advice. When people have marital problems,
we help each other through those times. Someone else
mourned the anniversary of their brother’s death. We
just go through life together. It started out as a
superficial game, but it’s become much more than
that.”
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