How I learned to stop worrying and love the balm
Written by Jason Tocci at 8:18 pm on January 5th, 2012
Original illustration by Jerrod Maruyama
One of the most potentially frequent criticisms of free-to-play and social games is that so many are, quite simply, pointless. Games like FarmVille don’t really require you to do anything but click and come back later to click again. There’s no skill or meaningful decision-making involved, just repetition so mindless that some contend it’s practically an unethical waste of players’ time.
The ultimate illustration of this critique is Ian Bogost’s satirical Facebook game, Cow Clicker. As the designer and critic notes on his own blog, the whole point of Cow Clicker was to show just how pointless so many Facebook games are, offering nothing more to do than to click a cow. The joke backfired, though. As Leigh Alexander recently recounted on Kotaku, Cow Clicker ended up being Bogost’s most unexpectedly popular game, much to the designer’s disappointment. Eventually, he opted to “rapture” all the cows, leaving their pastures empty of anything to click, and drawing confused responses from players who just wanted to keep clicking cows.
Sometimes you just want to see a panda spew rainbows.
What’s the lesson here – not just for Cow Clicker, but on the pointless games it was modeled after? It isn’t that suckers will pay to waste their time on anything. Rather, as game designer Frank Lantz wrote in response to Alexander’s story on the game, Cow Clicker did offer something in the endless stream of goofy jokes, funny cow pictures, and perhaps even “a form of meditation … only stupider.”
If you’ve ever kept coming back to something worthless, maybe you can relate to this. Personally, Space Panda‘s my sugar-sweet poison. As the catchy tune on the start screen explains, “This is a game about a cartoon panda, and the panda is flying in space (or something).” You dodge prickly burs and catch strawberries. The controls aren’t consistently responsive, the panda’s movement isn’t really animated and the gameplay is about as deep as the Tiger handheld games I used to play before I could afford devices that outperformed my digital watch.
It is, however, totally freakin’ rad. In fact, even though I could’ve just played Space Panda for free in my web browser whenever I needed a pick-me-up, I opted to buy the 99¢ iPhone version just in case I ever needed some panda cheer on the go.
I don’t play Space Panda because it’s a good game. I play it because it offers me the ingredients of a smile, in a form I don’t have to think to process: the absurd start screen, the silly premise, the ridiculous auto-tuned musical loops, even the way that cute little panda blasts up to the next (completely identical) level when it collects enough strawberries, leaving a trail of rainbow in its wake. I don’t even care when I lose because the “Game Over” screen is hilarious. The whole thing is pointless, but I don’t think I’d love it any more if it had a point.
Sometimes having no point is, well, the whole point. Sometimes you don’t want a game to challenge you and make you better; you want play to be more of a soothing balm than an abrasive cleanser. Sometimes you just want to shut your brain off, but maintain just enough mental function that you don’t drool all over yourself. Sometimes, in a life full of countless choices – from the big stuff (“What do I want to be when I grow up?”) to the tiny but sometimes overwhelming (“What should I wear? Good Lord, why do I have so many shirts?”) – it’s nice to choose not to make choices. Sometimes you just want to see a panda spew rainbow.
Care Bear Stare!
Any game that melts away your stress and offers you a chance to smile, even for just a second a day, can’t be totally pointless. So long as we occasionally remember to eat, bathe, and put on pants before leaving the house (this time for sure!), it probably won’t kill us to spend a little time each day blasting a panda through space, tending pretend crops, or even clicking a cow, especially when it’s free.
The real issue arises when we spend more than a little time each day, and when we’re asked to shut off our brains and break the bank doing it. There are bigger ethical issues to face down than the allegation that games waste our time. After all, plenty of us are looking to do just that.
You can contact Jason Tocci at the following address : jason@pocketnext.com
