Try shopping for skiing equipment, model trains, classic car parts, fishing gear, musical instruments, or painting supplies and you will discover an important truth: Taking on a new hobby can get crazy expensive. Beyond that, they require a certain investment of time before the activity can begin to pay off. You’ll spend more than a few hours falling over before you get that hang of skiing, and you’ll hit a lot of sour notes before you can perform “Stairway to Heaven” for giddy onlookers.
Our hobby is no different. A console system will run you a couple hundred dollars at least, and then once you start buying games the expense can really pile up. On the PC side, most non-gaming computers aren’t equipped with the right hardware to play a majority of the titles on the shelves. Sure, they’re usually cheaper than consoles, but installing them can be a little daunting for someone who just treats their computer like any other appliance and doesn’t know anything about how they work. In fact, just buying a decent graphics card is probably more complex a task than you can reasonably expect from a newcomer. Either way, you’re going to be putting down some serious time and money before you can have a fun machine of your very own.
And once you do have the fun machine, then what? You still need to learn to play games. Aside from Wii titles, most games just assume you’re a gamer from the outset. Shoulder buttons? Quicktime events? D-pad? Games assume that you’re already fluent in their language and can recognize and react to these terms and symbols. Putting a game on easy (assuming there is an easy mode) doesn’t begin to solve the problem of simply teaching someone how to play. (A fun experiment: Sit a newbie down in front of a modern console game and watch when the tutorial prompts them to hit “R3”. Depressing the thumbstick is not an obvious move and doing so will generally not occur to new people no matter what icons you show them.)
In any case, if you want to be a gamer you’re going to need to spend some serious money and invest some time before you can enjoy the fun of shooting zombies, raiding tombs, and defeating insidious alien invasions. With our hobby, like many others, there are going to be a lot of people out there who would enjoy it if the entry fee wasn’t so high. Zynga has proven this to be true.
March Mayhem this year has casual/social networking game developer Zynga standing toe-to-toe with industry juggernaut Valve. As of this writing it’s much too close to know which way things will go, but it’s amazing to see the fans of casual flash games being so passionate about their chosen title.
Out of curiosity, I fired up Zynga’s mega-popular Farmville and gave it a try. It has a modest charm, although in terms of gameplay it doesn’t give us anything we haven’t seen already in an early-90’s PC strategy game, although played at a gentler pace. It encourages playing in ten minute sections several times a day as opposed to playing in a single evening-long binge like veteran gamers. The game will run on just about any web-enabled PC on the planet, and it does a good job of teaching you how to play.
So Zynga took a simple game dynamic we’re all familiar with and made it available to everyone, and suddenly they have a cash cow and are a major force in the industry. The game itself is probably more popular than any of the traditional titles from which its core gameplay was distilled.
The popularity of Farmville advances a thesis I’ve been working on for years: Gaming is the best form of entertainment (ever!!) and a lot more people would take part in it if the barrier to entry wasn’t so high. But the masses don’t have a good way to find out how fun it is. Once they do, it’s generally prohibitively expensive to get started. (That can’t be helped on the console side, but PC developers could certainly stop making things worse.) And even once you find out about games and have the machine, games do a bad job at welcoming the truly uninitiated.
What I’m worried about is that publishers will see Zynga’s success and wrongly conclude that these people are playing Farmville and Mafia Wars because the gameplay is uniquely fun. This is the wrong lesson to learn. Zynga is simply going after a demographic that’s been largely ignored for the past three decades: People who aren’t already gamers. This new surge doesn’t mean that simple management games with adorable graphics are the wave of the future. It means that years of advertising hardcore games to hardcore gamers in hardcore gaming communities has made the hobby far more insular than it needs to be. The next move should be to see what other kinds of games these people might like to play.
Shamus Young is the guy behind the Shamus Plays series here on the Escapist. You should go read that right now.
