Videogames or Sewage?

In response to IGN article 'Stacking Up Facebook Games', 1st Feb 2011 suggesting that social networking games make more money than most traditional videogames.

What makes more money: Tom Clancy or Hello Magazine? McDonalds or Heston Blumenthal? Videogames or sewage processing?

Social networking games are all the rage. Analysts, like the writer at IGN, are keen to make a comparison to traditional games, and it does indeed seem that social networking games, generating Monthly Active Users figures with many, many enviable digits, are going to be very profitable to those who can dominate that space; perhaps much more profitable than traditional games.

But what should the industry do with this information? Should developers all start to make social networking games, or at least include more social networking features, if that's where the biggest profit lies?

Change the context. If sewage processing makes more money than videogames, should games developers switch to sewage, or start to include more of the features of sewage in their games? Or, vice versa, if videogames make more money, should our sewage plants all become game developers and not bother treating sewage any more?

Far from being metaphorical sewage, the best social networking games are really good. They are creatively designed, extensively tested and honed, beautifully presented and clearly quite captivating to their players. I cannot criticise them for their content, although they are not the kind of game which interests me.

Nevertheless, I believe the success of social networking games to be bad for videogames in general. The problem arises because the good qualities I list above are not the reason for the games' success: the real reason is cynical user manipulation. Social networking games operate by engendering three behaviours in the players: (1) keep playing; (2) encourage your friends to play; (3) give us money. Every element of the game has to be engineered to optimise these behaviours, and whilst this does not necessarily preclude the creation of cultural value, it doesn't exactly encourage it. Citizen Kane doesn't compel you to watch it every day, drip feeding its story to a frenzy of mouse clicks. Hamlet doesn't stop mid-soliloquy until your friends also come to the theatre. The Mona Lisa doesn't charge you to upgrade her smile.

Social networking games are here to stay, at least for a while, because whether or not they are of cultural merit, they can be highly profitable. There is nothing wrong with profit - if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense - but there is more to life than the bottom line of a spreadsheet. If profit is our only aim, we may as well work with sewage.