Ian Bogost

This struck me as an interesting take, due to your analogy: (some) viruses[1] can be inoculated against. Looking at this through a 'real world' lens, rather than a mimetic one, suggests something stronger.

Your argument is that is, Facebook has an interest in providing inoculation against viruses to their users, while the viruses themselves (Zynga) have a vested interest in removing possible inoculating effects within their ecosystem. i.e. Facebook should provide inoculation against Zynga. Now, your argument revolves around the "active/positive" end of this, where you make an appeal to Facebook to reduce the most egregious examples of this[2], as it will increase user pleasure, enhance the ecosystem and provide you with healthy users. To be fair, this approach has produced some movement from Facebook on the more obvious ones (such as the early phone ads).

This is all well and good ~ however, you're ignoring the "negative/passive" way in which this is done.

Zynga actively creates an ecosystem that ensures that the most successful viruses (i.e. <b>your social game</b>) have to conform to the most successful strategies, precisely because it is so metric / psychologically driven. If you want to compete against a dominant virus, aping the same Skinner-driven models (http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/11/28/1931246/more-on-why-it-stinks-to-work-at-zynga) makes sense, both in market terms and ecological terms.

But you're aiming at the wrong target. Facebook isn't purely a host,…

> If morality is not the point, why "should [it] be grounded in a solid self-aware understanding of what and why you act"? Why "design intentionally"? Why "think about the details"? Why "care about consequences"? Why "hold onto what is good"? What is the measure of good? If you answer that Bartlett is talking about aesthetics not morality, then why the fuck did you bring him up? It would not be a "similar message" at all. See feedback about listening.

Of course he was talking about morality. He simply didn't need to bring it up. He didn't need to say "there exists immoral game design"; he understood that it was not him who needed to make the value judgement, but the designer who needed to make the judgement upon himself. He was making people into better designers, rather than offering a way to critique design.

Here's another example of the point the OP is making (and this time I can link to it, since it's not in the GDC Vault): http://www.bogost.com/writing/the_bulldog_and_the_pegasus.shtml And again, morality goes unmentioned. A different thinker talks about the same thing: http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/02/18/gameifying-everything/ But of course, my knowledge is restricted to game design. I'd have more trouble citing designers outside that field, though I suspect I could find something from Luke Wroblewski or someone from 37s or something.

By his own admission, the author is not talking about morality. He is saying that "Morals ... should be used to guide design…

> The issue comes down to if games are a legitimate, healthy hobby or not.

For me the issue is not whether "games are a healthy hobby", but whether F2P games are. I think they are not, or rather I should clarify: the kind of games usually called F2P or "freemium", which base their gameplay on grinding and which try to make you spend money to buy coins, which are powerups that essentially "speed up" the boring parts of the game are not a legitimate, healthy hobby. They are preying on people's addictive behavior while providing very little genuine value in return. They are what people like Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) derides as Skinner Boxes and what Ian Bogost mocked with his game "Cow Clicker" (http://bogost.com/games/cow_clicker/).

I'm a Kongregate player and there are true gems in there, but most F2P games can be safely disregarded. If it has coins you can buy, or you can spend real money to bypass parts of the game, this is a huge red flag. (Another genre that I completely ignore is the overcrowded "Empire Building Strategy Game", which if you pay attention is always the exact same game with a different skin every time -- and most are F2P, while we're at it).

That's only to a certain extent. You can imagine a set of all the pieces of art you can make and all the interesting pieces of art in that set. If they're are few interesting pieces, then the constraints do more harm than good. A good medium for expression will allow you to both express many ideas and restrict you from expressing the uninteresting ones.

To make this concrete, in programming, type checking eliminates all the programs which would have a type error so they are good constraints. But some languages constrain you in arbitrary way which hurts. For example, Java doesn't let you do any functional programming and has a weak type system, which means introduces design patterns.

Ian Bogost wrote a good piece on this called "Shit Crayons" comparing games like Spore to Photoshop, where even though Photoshop is more powerful, most of the stuff you can produce is bad, supporting the idea of constraints. But then he took apart Minecraft for being overly restrictive, causing many things like houses to be dull. http://bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons/

Respectfully, I think you're wrong on your conclusion.

There's a lack of alignment between a person's explicitly declared preferences and the things which actually make them happy. This is so ridiculously true when it comes to dating on and offline.

I think this is the real, society advancing problem on which dating centric startups should focus. I'm all for indulging people (and making a buck), but sites like this one generally are useless, depressing, and alienating to a good number of their users.

Edit:

There's also a really harmful cycle of addiction which a lot of people get into on these sites. Quite often the proprietors design their dating sites to promote such cycles, and it's more than a little depressing.

To see what I'm talking about, read Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker post [1], and then imagine that the daunting chore of participating in the "social game" is directly tied to your self worth.

At the very least please don't do that to your users.

1: http://bogost.com/writing/blog/cow_clicker_1/

Some people[1][2][3] have been doing long-form video game journalism for a while, mostly in the form of reviews that go in-depth into questions of video game design. As for long-form investigative game journalism I would recommend reading http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/ and its companion piece http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=1076 for an example.

[1] http://insertcredit.com/

[2] http://www.actionbutton.net/

[3] http://culture.vg/

Edit: oh, and check out Ian Bogost's online writing: http://www.bogost.com/writing/.

Edit 2: there are also video series about video games that are neither reviews nor consumer-oriented funny (or "funny") news programs but rather try to provide insight into the medium. See, for example, http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/.