Platform Games

I've ranted on about the dark-side of platforms, and elsewhere I may have ranted about the Federal Reserve, but you've got to admit that draconic control of the currency is better than feudalism and that even egregious or inconsistent policy on a mostly open platform is better than the retail game biz. Maybe things are getting better, win-win-win (not to be confused with its non-buzz-worthy little brother: win-win). Take for example platform competition in social games, where hi5 is trying to frame itself as the friendlier, less capital-intensive girlfriend developers have been looking for. You just have to win their approval first.

Now we have this strategy game run by platform holders that isn't unlike the intransitive relationship underlying games like Starcraft: deployment flanks cost-effectiveness, cost swarms power, power outguns any deployment. With platforms this translates to distribution... uh, cost, and the power of the product is known as "quality". My favorite conspiracy blog sheds some interesting links, on just how spurious this quality may be, Playfish's games are ostensibly higher quality than Zynga's games but Zynga's games have more "quality" in the sense of power through the application of effective behavioral psychology to its Skinner box. This mind-controlling sort of quality is actually a fulcrum of distribution masquerading as quality, but that doesn't stop it from dominating revenues since WoW crawled out of the Swamp Of Sorrows.

As far as platform holders go, their choices have never been what ratio do they themselves pursue in their portfolios - unless they were Nintendo they never really had the werewithal to control that - instead their choices was what indirect mechanisms do they use to target a particular ratio. XBLA was like the Terran army, quality but not stellar quality, very good distribution, expensive to dev for but not so expensive. PSN was like the Protoss, not a lot of stuff, expensive to dev, really high quality (and they actually funded stuff). WiiWare was like the Zerg, and every game that didn't hit the 6000 unit pay-out threshold (whoops, was that confidential?) was like a Zergling splashed with a classic scream. The iPhone is like the Terrans but you can only use Goliaths, medics and firebats (I admit the analogy is being stretched). Facebook is like the Zerg if you played with only Zerglings using the anabolic gland upgrade for super-speed, so far at least. In Facebook, either your nuerohacks and/or quality is tight enough to blast you into the seven figs right after launch, or your zergling rush fails. Congratulations, by the way, to Steve Meretsky and co. for a very successful delivery.

So here we have hi5 trying to be closer to Terran, still a platform as wide open as Sasha Grey, but attempting to be as poised and thoughtful as Sasha Grey. Because in the wake of everyone trying the Zergling rush, the need to build more hatcheries (advertising budget) rose, and thus the rush becomes a bit saturated. This is a play to try and tap their 50 million users with a higher gross margin, either through higher conversions or cheaper reach, they'll see where the cards fall. 50 million is a number which at once incites sneers or awe, depending on whether or not you work in social games. Personally, I enjoy playing the Protoss, but I tend to play Zerg.

Where we will see platform strategy evolve in the future, perhaps in another 6 months considering how exploratory Facebook has been, is around the intersection of real quality and "quality" in terms of mind control and viral Zerg rushing. Game spam is the social equivalent of cheap-o nudie apps on the iPhone or shoddily produced games on a "premium" console. The classically trained game designer (as if we have a classical period already), someone such as Tadgh Kelly or even our own Señor Costik, might claim that the lines are being drawn more sharply, that quality as-we-know-it will win the day, because it has to goddamnit, because good must triumph over evil, because people are smart.

Hey, many individuals are smart, but to quote the late, great George Carlin: "people are fucking dumb".

Consider that civilizations are platforms and their rules mean to accomodate the proliferation of memes of a certain range of character, such that an underlying behavioral pattern will emerge - on average - in the population at large. Research like that of Mr. Hopson in the above linked article, or my own, will continue to refine these tentacles. In the process we will transcend the fuedal system of platform gating and go abstract, toward a system of mind-tunnels burrowed by Zynga et al. in homage to the Viet Cong. In the same way that control of land abstracted toward the control of currency, so too will platform power diffuse toward design, but not the kind of design you wanted. hi5's move, along with Buzz, suggests early positionings that will put pressure on the monolithic network and a premium on new, "innovative" ways to wrangle people up (in the sense that Credit Default Swaps are "innovative").

Beware the New World Order, it is here, it is private, it is "fun" - you will be monetized, resistance is futile. The conspiracy is our own, we click on our animal instincts. Living free in the Snow Crash is a game in itself, perhaps the ultimate.

I leave you with the sharpest bit from the Cryptogon rant:

"You might have been like me and never even heard of this FarmVille madness before today, but if we are to believe that 75.2 million people are spending any amount of time doing this…

Has reality become such a mean and ugly bitch that tens of millions of people are searching for a functional society inside the screen? Why is a game about small scale agriculture the most popular game of all on Facebook? Do the people playing this game have access to safe, affordable, good tasting food?"

When the CIA sexually and physically abused children in their Project MONARCH experiments under the umbrella of MK-Ultra, they would induce trauma and then provide an escape, "somewhere over the rainbow" in which the victem would find an alternate personality. This technique is now being applied on a mass scale, the fiat-currency system provides trauma to everyone that participates and these games are the "cure".