Facebook Gaming vs Real Games

As an experiment of sorts I installed a bunch of Facebook games to my profile to see why people play those games. I quickly saw that these games are merely made so that you can waste your time faster at a dead-end job (maybe a real job) rather than at the usual braindead rate.

Life is strife. Life is challenge. Most of the FB games I found (like 99% of them) don’t have any death penalty. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re immortal? Like seriously, even Tic Tac Toe is more hardcore. Even Pong is insanely more punishing than the typical FB game.

I found a pattern with most of these games. The typical game will let you do a certain amount of actions or so per hour or per day, regenerating your ability to do more if you wait or if you pay real life money or facebook money. I guess this appeals to people who always thought video games were retarded but now they’re addicted to the most base form of “video games”.

FB games are basically blatant ripoffs on concepts taken from old school BBS door games. There’s a ton that involve having land, building an army, and attacking other players for resources. Of course, all these games now involve “leveling up” which sometimes doesn’t even give you anything but just goes to show how much of a loser you are for playing the game for longer than 2 minutes.

I actually found one FB game which does have death and losing but pretty much nobody plays it. The game is called Verdonia and it plays a lot like an MMO version of Defender of the Crown. The game consists of building up your country and conquering land from NPC and other player nations. Most other games are about trains or zombies or farms or dumb shit. It’s just a bunch of pointless fucking grinding that makes even the worst play-for-free MMO look like a work of art.

I guess these games appeal to the basic gaming addict that just want their level to go up with no point or skill needed. Here, just click on this button a bunch of times and level up your farm/zombie herd/etc.

I played these games for a bunch of days and then I fired up even some games that I had been sick of playing and here is what happened. OMFG, is this what fun feels like? Like, I’m sick of playing certain games that I play all the time with my friends like Dawn of War 1 and 2, Battleforge, GRID, etc but Jesus H Christ, even grinding these games that don’t even give me any gratification anymore is much more entertaining than even the best FB game. I found that my skill in playing games that require practice degraded a lot and I had to repractice to get my skills up to par.

Let’s talk about specific games:

– Lucky Train: Build trains, board them, click to send them, repeat over and over and over and over and over (kill yourself)
– Office & Co: Simulates pointless office jobs, the best part of the game being when you fight your boss and you play rock, paper, scissors with the chance of losing, only to repeat it again. You can’t get fired unlike in real life, for playing this game at work and getting caught.
– BRAAAINS: Cute graphics but that doesn’t make up for a game where you can’t die. Build up a zombie army and keep doing it over and over as you fight random strangers in an uncontrolled pvp animated match.
– Mobsters 2: Vendetta: Kind of neat to see the different missions that you can do but essentially, you read it once and who cares after you click on the mission again for the 40th time.
– Castle Age: “rpg” fantasy game where you do quests that are just you clicking the quest button over and over and then you fight bosses and pvp other players, with no real death penalty. Pointless.
– OfficeWorld: Tired of your pointless job in real life? Go be an asshole in a virtual office in this game. Click on people and deal with office drama, again without being able to get fired.
– TrainStation: Similar to LuckyTrain, except not as cute.
– CarTown: Game for people who wish they were 6 years old again and could play Micro Machines.
– NightClub City: One of the neater games, again you can’t lose. Cool thing about it is that it plays samples from real musicians which I guess it’s a way for you to buy their singles online.
– RomanTaxi: You run a taxi service in Ancient Rome… Yeah…
– Mercenaries of War: Create a band of warriors and fight NPCs and other players, and even though they just shot you with assault rifles, you can never lose to the point of having to make a new character. What fucking bullshit is that?
– BrainBuddies: Harder than the other games I just mentioned. You get to do little brain teasers to see how clever you are, or just how many times you did these quizzes and memorized what you had to do.
– City of Wonder: Civilization rip off in which you attack random people and build up your city with again little consequence of chance of dying.
– Tetris Friends: At least this is modeled after a real game. How can you fuck up Tetris?

Okay, I’m going to go punch a wall and play some hangman on paper with some elementary school kids because at least I can die in that game. Makes me want to fire up some Hello Kitty Online for Slaneesh’s sake!

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