Compulsion Loops

Definition

Artificial incentive systems are part of our cyborg reality. The concept is called "intermittent reinforcement". It came out of Skinnerian experiments that found that rats who got irregular rewards from food-bar-pushing were far more driven to compulsively push the bar. If all E-mail arrived in one's mailbox once per day, society would revolve around checking for mail once a day. Instead, E-mail can appear at any time, day or night. This intermittent reinforcement causes an increase in information addiction as more and people check their mail and social network inboxes more frequently.

Compulsion Loops in Games

Games can also contain compulsion loops revolving around virtual characters with intermittent actions and effects. The structure and obligations of Farmville are very similar to those of the Tamagotchi. Many mechanics involve caring for needy animals, crops, and plots of land. "The secret to Farmville's popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics", writes A. J. Liszkiewicz, "Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others' farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. "We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another," says Liszkiewicz, "because we are polite, cultivated people".

FarmVille was a farming simulation social network game developed by Zynga and launched on Facebook in June 2009. At its peak in early 2010 it had over 80 million monthly active users, making it the most popular application on Facebook and, by user count, one of the largest games ever made. The original Facebook version was shut down on 31 December 2020, following the end of support for Adobe Flash.

Players planted crops, harvested them, and used the proceeds to buy more land, animals and decorations. The central mechanic was the timer: a crop planted took a fixed real-time period to mature, and if it was not harvested within a window afterwards it withered and the investment was lost.

Two things follow from that design. The game required players to return at specific times, including inconvenient ones, and the schedule was set by the game rather than by the player. And progress was gated by waiting rather than by skill, which meant that the two ways to advance were to wait, or to pay — with a third option that made the game enormous: to recruit other people.

Social Mechanics

FarmVille is one reference case for what became known as viral game design. Progress required items obtainable only from friends; actions generated posts on friends' feeds; helping a neighbour benefited both parties; and new players brought bonuses to whoever recruited them. The game was, in effect, a machine for converting a social graph into growth, and it worked so well that Facebook substantially rewrote its feed and application rules in 2010 to limit the volume of automated posting.

The revenue model was free-to-play with microtransactions, chiefly for time — paying to skip a wait — and for decorative items with no functional effect, purchased for display to other players. Compare conspicuous consumption in a setting where the goods have no use value at all and the signalling function is undisguised.

Criticism

FarmVille attracted an unusual amount of critical attention for a casual game, most influentially A. J. Patel's and Ian Bogost's. Bogost's response was the satirical game Cow Clicker (2010), which stripped social games to their skeleton — a cow, a click, a six-hour timer, an option to pay to skip it — and which then acquired a genuine and enthusiastic player base, a result Bogost described as instructive and dispiriting.

The substantive objections were that the game contained no meaningful choices, that its core loop was an operant conditioning schedule rather than play, that it monetised anxiety about losing invested time, and that it used players' friendships as an advertising channel without their considered consent.

FarmVille is a clear demonstration of the mechanics that were subsequently adopted across non-game software: streaks, timers, loss aversion, social obligation as a retention device, and payment to remove artificial friction. Nearly every technique now discussed under the heading of engagement design was proven at scale here first.

It is also a case study in future runoff of an unusual kind. The game ended not because players left but because a dependency did — Flash — and eleven years of accumulated farms, purchases and relationships ended with it. Nothing was preserved, and nothing could be, which is a durable lesson about what it means to build a place inside someone else's platform.

Related Reading

• The Attention Economy
• Thorstein Veblen
• Future Runoff
• Ambient Socialization
• Frictional Interface
• Belonging