With not a whimper but a bang, NEoN '09 came to a close on Sunday night with a performance by Videogames Live. The festival certainly provided plenty of food for thought over its two day run of speakers, but nothing quite got me thinking, and worrying, so much as a subject that came up during the Friday's workshops.
During my first workshop slot, I was in with Neil Ross, Head of European Operations for e4e Interactive (formerly Absolute Quality). His talk was interesting, covering such topics as Playfish's recent buyout by EA and the future of that most 'casual' of gaming formats, the social game. Games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, Tiny Adventures and Fishville are played, sometimes to obsession, by millions of people every day. They're played by people from a variety of different demographics, from housewives to business executives to the elderly. These games commonly use an incentive reward system that encourages continued play and only allow a full experience of the game if you are willing to pay.
Taking into account the multitude of demographics playing these games, this thought started to concern me as the talk moved on to discuss the increasing number of children playing these games. Playing these games is not, in itself, harmful to children, but ultimately with a child you get the immediate issue of an underdeveloped sense of self control. If a child is playing Farmville and can't get a decent harvest without paying a pound for the latest model of combine harvester then they are not going to be happy. Without facility to pay for these things themselves, it's mummy and daddy who will fork out the money time and time again. There is already a culture of this in our society at the moment where the concept of delayed gratification on children, but what concerns me most is that children are now learning from a young age are learning that this is okay - they can always get exactly what they want, when they want and all they need is mummy and daddy's credit card.
This idea should be particularly alarming to anyone who has ever heard of Walter Mischel and his "marshmallow test". Walter Mishcel is an American psychologist specialising in personality theory and social psychology who, in the late 1960s, conducted a series of tests on a group of preschoolers, aged four years old at the time. These children were each given a marshmallow and promised another in addition to it if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Some children waited, but others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence and demonstrated that those who managed to wait were better adjusted, more dependable and scored around 210 points higher on Scholastic Aptitude Tests.
More disturbingly, with the research followed through into adulthood, some of those who didn't manage to wait ended up gamblers, drug addicts and criminals. Those that escaped this trap were still less likely to exercise, to take care of their personal hygeine, eat well or put in more than the bare minimum at work. They were the least successful of the group and were only interested in short term payoffs and immediate gratification, just as they had been as children.
Now imagine that all children are brought up in a world where immediate gratification is the norm from birth. They never have to wait for their marshmallow - no one ever asks them to. While this may not be a big problem while they are children, we are inactuality raising generations of adults who will not know how to defer gratification and will ultimately be lazy, selfish and self-involved.
So while in itself these games are harmless, it's the impact on an underdeveloped mind that we have to worry about. Microtransactions in social games are not inherantly a bad thing, but the rule of thumb "everything in moderation" must be key. As an adult you can choose to spend as much time and money as you like on these games, but a child needs the lines drawn for them or they will never learn to draw them themselves. We can only hope that current and future parents alike remember this when they sit their tyke down to play a few hours of Fishville...
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