Facebook is the modern video arcade, and 2010 is 1980.

This idea is half-baked and unready, but I just wanted to get it out there so at least somewhere on the internet the string “Facebook as today’s arcade” would appear. I owe an intellectual debt to John Romero and Brenda Brathwaite for pointing out some of the similarities between the industrial landscape of Facebook game developers and that of arcade game developers, and to UHM’s own David Mershon for pointing out the importance of place in the nomenclature of both groups of games.

In retrospect, this idea seems stunningly obvious, and I hope this means that the concept is powerful and true, rather than that it is obvious and dull.

The Parallels

• A new set of game-applicable technologies emerge:
  • Fairly cheaply available display technology and microprocessors.
  • Cheap and fast enough hardware to run high-level graphical programming languages like Flash.
• These technologies become available on a grand scale:
  • Arcade cabinets were installed not just in arcades, but in convenience stores, bars, &c.
  • Facebook games with iPhone or Android incarnations can be played nearly anywhere; PCs and laptops enable game-playing in another broad category of spaces.
• Both groups of games are named after where they are played (“Arcade games”; “Facebook games”) rather than what the play consists of, adding to the sense of primacy of place.
• Games are produced by small teams on tight cycles that encourage huge amounts of production:
  • Arcade games were developed on the scale of a few weeks to a couple of months, not a few years.
  • Facebook games are launched after mere weeks of development, and are gradually extended over time.
• These games’ designers are often under-credited:
  • In the arcade age, the distributors and the manufacturers claimed equal or greater credit.
  • In the age of Facebook, faceless and clever viraliy- and compulsion-maximizing product managers are more important than designers, and basically none of these are credited—just the company.
• Rather than expensive monolithic entertainment products, these games are designed as if they were services—to work on repeated compulsive expenditures of small sums of money:
  • Arcade games traded in quarters for a handful of minutes of gameplay, extensible by player skill—but the design of the games was always to maximize quarters-plunked-down.
  • Facebook games (not being scarce resources) are usually free to play, but support a thriving trade in 1-5 dollar amounts for tchotchkes as well as shortcuts through the game’s core compulsion loop (just like paying extra quarters for continues or more playtime)—the design of the games is always to maximize times-returned, dollars-inserted, and related metrics.
• Though many of these games are single-player, a huge component of their appeal is in performative, asynchronous, public play:
  • Arcade games’ high score lists inspired a generation of players to compete with each other and devise new strategies.
  • Friendly competition — and instant notifications of new high scores — form a major part of the compulsion cycle of Facebook games.
    • In fact, Facebook games that support asynchronous cooperation tap into new forms of play motivation that conventional arcades, with their boundedness to a physical location and their scarcity of machines, could never have done.
• These games present a vast new market:
  • Arcade games fed an enormous population of game players who didn’t identify as traditional gamer geeks, with stories of arcade machines’ stuffed coinboxes and national coin shortages in Japan serving as a backdrop for an industry with extremely high margins (for distributors) and easy entry (for operators).
  • Facebook games reopen the now middle-aged market, especially the female portion—who didn’t identify as traditional gamer geeks—, to games, with stories of Zynga’s incredible success suggesting an industry with extremely high margins.
• And this market is also open to exploitation by old-guard technologists:
  • Pong, Galaxian, Asteroids, Pac-Man, and countless other games were incessantly cloned and re-cloned at a rate that would make cancer cells blush. Bushnell’s “jackals” were computer engineers who wanted in on what the game developers had discovered, and were able to make similar hardware faster and cheaper, though perhaps not better.
  • Happy Farm, Restaurant City, Parking Wars, Poker, and countless other games are incessantly cloned and re-cloned at a rate that would make the Pong-on-a-chip “jackals” blush. Zynga’s CEO Mark Pincus is reputed to have said “I don’t fucking want innovation. You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.” Apart from web developers, older game publishers such as Electronic Arts have bought their way into this space to aggressively court Facebook’s enormous potential audience.
• These games are not uncontroversial:
  • Arcade games were widely played, yet arcades were seen as unsavory places and the games were considered wastes of time.
  • Facebook games are played by dozens of millions, but even ardent players often describe the games as time-wasters.
• And certain players are lionized for their achievements:
  • Some individual arcade players sunk extreme amounts of money into the machines, and earned enough skill to become demigods of the games. They were often rewarded by publishers or arcades with special promotions.
  • Social game makers and virtual goods providers identify certain game players who spend drastically more money than others as “whales”, similarly to casinos. These whales also tend to stick to a single game once they have invested.
• Unfortunately, the industry was built in an unsustainable way
  • Arcade games crashed spectacularly as their audience moved on and their social situation changed—and as audiences tired of repetitive, cheap-feeling experiences.
  • FrontierVille has lost over 10% of its users over the last month, and FarmVille’s “audience has collapsed by 26 percent”. It’s possible that the exploitive behavior of Zynga and its ilk may have already exhausted the public’s patience for Facebook games (or at least, the *Ville family).

I’m sure there are even more comparisons beneath the surface and some important differences (like lack of place, and the difference between arcade games’ emphasis on dexterity and skill versus Facebook games’ more inclusive approach) that may shed light on the changes in society between the 1980s and now and the different possible outcomes—as well as what this means for developers beyond curiosity. This is currently the weakest part of the concept for me, as I hesitate to produce research that will be interesting but merely clever.