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Farm Story 2 is evil in a way that inspires not rebellion, but pity.
This is a well-crafted game. There are barely any bugs and the art is attractive sầu if generic. The bug-eyed chickens are charming, và it has a scamp of a kid who is adorable until the third or fourth time they implore you khổng lồ install another of Storm8’s insipid games. I don’t have sầu a quarrel with any of the (mercifully uncredited) people who worked on the game. My issue is with the environment who produced such a work. Let’s explore the darkness at its depths.
Farm Story 2‘s evil is based in its exploitation of humans’ psychological và neurological weaknesses in the pursuit of profit without providing anything of worth in return. Most games take advantage of our mental foibles in order khổng lồ provide brain-stem-level rewards, but in exchange they provide fun, or escapism, or enriching story & worlds. FS2 provides only the opportunity lớn reward its creators with your money in order to get temporary respite from discomfort. “Give me money,” FS2 says, “và you can make this stop.”
The Weaknesses of Humanity and the Exploitation Thereof
It’s pretty well-known aao ước game kiến thiết circles that our brains have sầu certain fundamental bugs. Taking advantage of our logical fallacies & psychological quirks can let us vì pretty cool things, but we game designers have a responsibility khổng lồ bởi vì things that are mutually beneficial to lớn our customers & our wallets. The patron who requested this article asked about Farm Story 2, “Please help me: why can’t I stop?” Here’s why.
Farm Story 2 is a fairly standard business management game, sans the business management. You plant crops và buy animals, và then you return periodically khổng lồ collect the hàng hóa (in the pigs’ case, you collect bacon from their living bodies). You replant some of the seed, feed the animals, & fulfill random “orders” for assorted hàng hóa. Sometimes you use buildings lớn convert raw materials inkhổng lồ more complex materials. There are no maintenance costs, no market trends: nothing khổng lồ plan for or strategize about. You just tap all the things that you can tap, then wait until you can tap more things.
Processing FluencyThere’s a base-màn chơi pleasure to lớn this action. The processing fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure is a theory of psychology that says that things we can easily underst& or process are aesthetically pleasing. We enjoy understanding what’s going on & seeing the pattern in it. By making a simple system that we can demonstrate understanding of, even when tired or busy, FS2 ties inkhổng lồ that base desire.
To take full advantage of this, a designer needs to lớn disguise the source of the understanding. To put it another way, if you realize that you underst& something just because it’s simple, you’ll be less satisfied. This ties into lớn Raph Koster’s Theory of Fun, which proposes that the fun in games arises out of mastery of complex systems. FS2 provides Nilla Wafer levels of simple satisfaction, but its systems aren’t complex enough for actual mastery.
Mere ExposureNot lớn worry, though. By the time you realize how shallow the game is, it’s hooked you with another flaw in your brain patterns: the mere-exposure effect. You lượt thích things which are familiar, even if only through repetition. In Farm Story 2, wheat takes 120 seconds lớn grow. Corn takes 240. Each time one of these crops completes, you get a push notification: “You have Wheat (sic) ready to lớn harvest!” If you respond lớn even half of these notifications, you’re opening the game up every few minutes. This game will become familiar to lớn you before you realize it has little khổng lồ offer.
You’ll also become familiar with Storm8’s other products. As mentioned earlier, the characters in the game will implore you to lớn install other games by the same company. These notices appear in your quest log alongside actual game goals, và these requests are in addition khổng lồ the more normal interstitial advertisements that appear every time you open the game. As a result of these advertisements, you’re more likely to lớn download those games if you come across them elsewhere. Even if you don’t recognize them, hey’ll seem pleasant, thanks khổng lồ the brainwashing you got from Farm Story 2.
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Partial ReinforcementAs you get inkhổng lồ the game, you’ll soon run out of space in storage or on your l&. In order to lớn tăng cấp or exp&, you need certain resources that you can only get from fulfilling orders or clearing underbrush (which consumes tools)1. These resources, however, arrive randomly. They only sometimes appear, và when they vì chưng they are selected from a long danh sách, which means that you only rarely get the specific resource you want.
This takes advantage of the Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect, or PREE. If you put a pigeon in a box & let it pull a lever to get food, it will pull that lever quite a bit. However, if that lever only sometimes gives food, the pigeon will pull the level more urgently, and it will take longer khổng lồ give up on pulling the lever when the food stops coming.
Farm Story 2 trains you to keep playing it in the same way that Pavlov trained his dog to lớn drool on command.
Escalation of CommitmentIf you play Farm Story 2 or a similar game, you probably recognize these things. You’ve already realized that the game’s appeal lies solely in its simplicity và familiarity, và you’ve probably already felt uncomfortable with how excited you get when the tedious order fulfillment finally gives you the l& permit or seven that you need. You want to stop. Why don’t you stop?
Because you’ve already spent so much time on it. You’re suffering from escalation of commitment. Related lớn the behavior surrounding sunk costs, this phenomenon means that we don’t lượt thích abandoning behaviors that have sầu already cost us effort và resources. We don’t want to lớn leave sầu a bad movie because we’ve already paid for the ticket. We don’t want to thua kém an auction even when bidding exceeds an item’s value. We don’t want to leave sầu Vietnam because so many people have already died.
Because you have sầu invested time in this game, quitting it feels like an admission of failure. However, every additional moment spent playing it is another moment lost, increasing your sunk costs. The sooner you quit, the less you will have sầu lost.
The Designer’s Responsibility
As game designers, we must give as much as we take. Especially when trying to run a business, we choose khổng lồ take money, time, and effort from our players. We have a responsibility lớn give something in return. Whether it be mastery over a genuinely interesting challenge, good feelings, an enriching moral question, social interaction, or just a pleasant story, we need khổng lồ make sure that our relationship with players is mutual & nurturing, not exploitative sầu.
In exchange for your time reading this post, here is a gift. If you want an easy, xinh tươi game about tapping a bunch of things, making numbers go up, and getting push notifications that things are ready lớn be collected, tải về Happy Street. It provides the same brain-stem attractions discussed above, but in exchange you get cute characters, silly story, và a good feeling instead of a bad taste in your mouth.
Now I have to lớn go & uninstall Farm Story 2.
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