Social Games – I get it and then again, I don’t.

I’ll preface this commentary by saying that I’m not the target audience for MetaPlace.  The least of what I am as a gamer is social.  Hell, I’m barely social in real life. Heavy social features and social tools don’t interest me much in my gaming.  Yet, I checked out MetaPlace because Tipa at West Karana had posted about a Steampunk(SP) area that had been commented on by Cuppytalk.  I ventured into the SP creation which was cute, hopped around various other zones whose descriptions interested me, played a mini game, didn’t see many players as I wandered along and logged out.

When I’m interacting in games like MetaPlace (MP) and SecondLife (SL) I always think, this would be interesting if I had more time - time to actually figure out where everyone is hiding (as in see other players), time to shuffle through the mediocre content to find the gems, time to find the area with content that would appeal to me, time to figure out what I’d do in such virtual spaces other than walk around, etc.  Unfortunately, for me, time is a very precious commodity and I guard it fiercely.

I’m in the adultween stage.  You know, that one IN BETWEEN when life was young and stretched out before you, with more time than you could use (1 to 30).  And the later years, as you wind down into retirement planning and leisure, where time is yours to spend in more lavish ways and on personal indulgences (55 to until).  In the adultween years, you’re recovering from choices in the earlier days, raising a family, working at relationships, forging careers, keeping an eye on financial empowerment and stability – basically, managing today and working toward securing that ever closer tomorrow.   Time feels more finite and has a higher cost.

My gaming tastes have changed – well that’s not wholly accurate, it’s not that my gaming tastes changed in the adultween, it’s that my tolerances changed.  I’m much less tolerant of wasted time, especially in settings where I’m expecting fun and entertainment.  Working through the grind, pushing past poor design, dealing with massive time sinks and looking through the haystack for the needle of fun, are things I’m less tolerant of as an adultween gamer.

When I’m poking around games like SL and MP, I see the things that I would have enjoyed at other times in my life.  Like building a reading sanctuary reflective of my fantasy tastes, share some poetry and digital art.  I would have created virtual spaces about my large work-in-progress fiction projects, with representation of primary characters.  But these days, my road to fun in a game needs to be immediately evident and readily accessible.  No time to search for it by turning over every rock.

So while I “get” the social tools such as Twitter, Facebook and the alike, and understand the ideas and creativity behind social games like SL and MP, I’m clearly not the target audience, being less social than many.  Moreover, living through the adultween years of my life, I’m particular in how I spend my gaming time and less inclined to "look for the fun" in a game.

Comments

[Beau]

Are you leaning more towards "I don't have time to waste on looking for fun.." or "I just don't have time..."

I understand what you mean about looking for fun, searching out the hot-spots and all that.

But, if you mean that you simply don't have time, I would just suggest slowing down. Take the time. Heck, I spend my time spread among 5 billion games, so I found ways to spend the time in small chunks. It takes longer, but I'm only 35, this stuff ain't going nowhere for a while and neither am I (knock on wood) !

Again, maybe that's why F2P's make sense being that there are no subs slowing running down time, no deadlines?

Oh, by the way, no family planning at the Turkey household...EVER! (Thank da lord.)

Beau

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

@Beau - I mean, I don't have time to waste trying to find the fun. I would never have expected to say this but I wish for more F2P or Freemium models. Wizard101 and Runes of Magic have shown me the light. There are games I'd play more often, here and there, if I didn't have to a languishing subscription for months on end when I wasn't playing. EQ2 and EVE come to mind, especially EQ2. I'm not going to resub to play a day or two out of the month. But I'd certainly send dollars their way when I was playing like I did in Runes of Magic. But I get that the subs is the prevailing model in NA AAA titles. Oh well.

[We Fly Spitfires]

For me, social media like Twitter and Facebook are great for passing idle moments but I'm not sure I'd want to spend hours at a time on them.

As for social games, yeah, I'm with you. Nice idea but you really need goals and objectives in games to make you want to play them.

[Beau]

Well, not everyone needs goals and objectives in order to want to play.

In fact, games like Second Life and other social games have shown that plenty of players enjoy non-goal oriented gaming. Even games that have many goal-oriented players are frequented by non-goal oriented players. Games like WoW, EVE and Vanguard have a large population of players that are just having some fun.

Beau

[Bhagpuss]

Nice summation of the middle-aged state of mind. I also have a lot less interest in doing stuff for the sakeof doing it than I did when I was 25, or even 35. I do like to have some purpose in mind that I have thought out in advance, even though on an objective scale that purpose may be trivial.

Which isn't to disagree with Beau that there's plenty of fun to be had just roaming around, but there's a HUGE difference between unstructured pottering in Vanguard or WoW, where there is pre-made, accessible content just piled up waiting for you to fall over it and having to build your fun from the ground up in a social environment like SL or Wurm Online.

I like to have unfettered, unstructured serendipitous fun in my MMOs, but I want it to come from me stumbling over interesting stuff that other people have lovingly crafted and put there for me to find.

[Alysianah aka Saylah]

Not finding online gaming when I was a teenager, would have been MUD back then, is blessing and a curse. A blessing because I might have spent too much time in them to have some like-minded people to chat and play with. I was the geek of the geeks, in our household and friends, who didn't get the whole fantasy, RP and wanting to adventure thing. Oh the crazy things I did get my friends to do though. This Little Rascals in the suburbs of NYC. That desire mostly manifested itself in writing since there wasn't anyone to introduce me to gaming.

Curse is that I could have been enjoying gaming much sooner and probably would have fashioned a career in that industry versus selling my soul to Corporate America.

I'm with Bhag - I love structured games that also have opportunities for putter around too. Self-made adventuring and exploration. Self-defined challenges like attempting soloing the unsoloable. Getting a view from places you shouldn't be able to reach and stuff like that. But pure social games hold no allure for me.