Brighter Flames Arrayed

At some point during a faculty discussion Farmville was brought up and it was immediately dismissed since it is not something that our students would want to play since the graphics looked like they were meant for small children. That really scares me. Farmville, when I think about it, is much more destructive (and much less constructive) than games like World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2, which many of our students do play. And when you think about it it is so much easier to dismiss Farmville since it doesn’t look like a game that so many people over the world—and so many students in our school—would play.

In four years (from 2004 to 2008), World of Warcraft managed to gather 11 million subscribers (according to the Wikipedia article and some math). The New York Times claims that Farmville has 22 million players playing daily four months after launch. I don’t have the hard numbers to prove it (yet) but I’m pretty sure many more of our students play Farmville over World of Warcraft. For one, we block WoW access on campus but since we do not block Facebook (many day schools do, but we are a boarding school and do not) Farmville is easily accessible. Also, Farmville is free and World of Warcraft involves money, therefore (possibly) parental approval and a credit card.

I can argue that many games our students play regularly (anecdotal evidence, since I haven’t had time to collect hard data) have educational “redeeming” qualities. World of Warcraft teaches teamwork. Call of Duty trains reflexes and hand-eye coordination. The Sims, if you consider it as a simulation in which your actions have determinable consequences on a closed system, teach programming and perhaps ethics. Starcraft (we have a lot of Oriental international students) does all three to a varying degree. Maybe I’m a video game apologist. But no matter how hard I try I can’t really say that Farmville teaches anything of significance.

Being billed as a social game Farmville sure has very few “social” features. The two main social aspects of Farmville is “bother other people to get things” and “visit others’ farms to get things”. The former makes Farmville something of a pyramid scheme (like almost all Facebook games) and the latter, until a recent update, did not actually accomplish anything cooperatively. Even now visiting another person’s farm does not provide actual “interaction” and “teamwork” means “if you click on my farm five times we both get a very, very, very small amount of extra stuff”. Farmville also allows you to “gift” others with trees, items and animals but once again there is no actual social interaction in the gifting process.

What annoys me is not that Farmville’s social features are lacking but that it is marginally more popular than other, similar games that encourage actual social interaction. For example, Farmtown is a similar game that allows you to hire others to plow your fields or harvest your crops and by going to a central chat room and hiring people the player spends less time clicking monotonously and possibly even learn something about labor supply and demand. In essence, Farmville’s teamwork component asks players to put in more time playing to obtain small amounts of in-game resource reward (which, I must add, is actually not worth the time) or put in time to send unsolicited mail to other people so those others can spend more time playing. Games like Farmtown (and World of Warcraft) reward players in both a reduced time necessary to reach a goal and in-game resources when they work as teams.

Do I really have to go into why clicking on rhombuses to plant crops repeatedly is not an exercise in hand-eye coordination for young people without disabilities and is more likely to help them develop health issues instead? I look forward to the day when someone posts an article or paper on using Farmville as a physical therapy tool but I’m not holding my breath.

You could argue that Farmville is a simulation of farming and is a modern iteration of old educational simulation games like SimFarm with new graphics. That would be true except that Farmville has almost no risk involved. This is the main reason why I think Farmville doesn’t actually teach anything. A real farmer has to gauge what to plant crops and when to plant crops or what animals to raise (a local farm sends out chicken pre-order forms so they can decide how many chickens to raise each season) and planning a farm is a real, complicated economics problem. Since there are no weather, no supply and no demand there are only two factors involved in choosing what to plant: which crop makes me the most money/experience points and will I be able to log in to harvest it when it is ready. The only possibility of failure in Farmville is to forget to log in to harvest your crops before they go bad. Basically, if you log in everyday (which many people do) you cannot lose.

Maybe that’s why my students are obsessed with Farmville. If you haven’t noticed from the top corner of this blog I teach at a school on a big ol’ farm. I’ve asked students why they don’t just walk over to the barn and milk real cows instead of milking fake ones on their computer screen and the answer has generally been “but I did that this morning!”. You can in fact screw up real farming really easily; and it’s hard! Farmville is an idealized form of farming that involves no risk, no physical work beyond sitting there and clicking on boxes. And it still gives the simulated satisfaction of producing “food”. Of course, it doesn’t actually produce anything of value; I’ll excuse a student who needs to go feed real cows from work, but I don’t think I’ll ever let “I needed to harvest my raspberries so I couldn’t do my math homework” be a valid excuse in the classroom.

Farmville is a much bigger problem, I feel, than any other game out there right now. And it really scares the crap out of me.

Postscript: There is one somewhat possible redeeming factor to Farmville: using Farmville as a medium for visual art. Just like real farmers cropping their crops to resemble a picture of someone and taking an aerial photo of it Farmville players are using the decorative items and crops in Farmville to make pictures. Decorating a farm is a real draw to Farmville and is an outlet for lots of creativity; it is also a steady revenue stream since buying decorative items cost money and one quick way to get all that in-game money is by spending real money.

Wing :: Feb.28.2010 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »

I’m not mad at Google Buzz because it wants to be another social network service that gathers stuff from me and splat it out all over the Internet. That’s awesome. My problem with it is that it may be a product launch that will actually reduce the amount of technological progress we make as a whole.

The immediate fallout of Buzz is that now we can no longer expect any part of a web based e-mail system to be private. It never really was; I don’t doubt that web based e-mail services have been selling information to spammers and we know that Google harvests message contents to show us ads. That’s fine. But to blatantly slap their power in all the users’ faces is not. Yeah, we know you can do this, but don’t rub it in our faces and call it a good thing.

From the parental/teacher standpoint a bigger problem with Buzz is that everything is automatic. With Facebook and Myspace there is a key component to a breach of privacy: you have to provide the information before it can be leaked to someone you do not want to see the information. Just like we teach our kids, if you don’t put it on your Facebook profile nobody will know about it but assume you will have no control over it once it’s there. Buzz is changing that game. Relevant data that you did not actively generate is now shared with others. The part that the Internet is focused on is that I can be “friends” (networked through a bi-directional edge) with someone simply because they harassed me and I replied telling them not to harass me. The most prominent case of this being that of a woman who gets harassed by men who think it’s cool to rape her suddenly having her entire contact list (including her mother’s e-mail address) exposed to all those people. When you have a software rollout that may result in facilitating capital crimes it’s a little more than an oops. It does immediate damage. Also, it kills trust.

This brings me to the reason that I absolutely hate Google Buzz is probably the same reason Google itself hates it at this point: it completely destroys trust in Google’s services. We’re on the verge of great technological innovation with what Google’s been doing. Google Apps is amazing. Google Docs is an exceptionally useful piece of technology. Many schools and non-profits have switched to or are switching to Google Apps from the traditional Novell/Lotus/Exchange/FirstClass/whatever models they’ve been using. But now that Google has demonstrated that it can and will create a gaping (physical) security hole for all 150 million plus of its users for the sake of a product that isn’t very good I wonder if sysadmins and administrators will continue to trust Google with Google Apps. I surely won’t; not to the degree that I currently do anyway. And that’s really, really sad because Google Apps is a great piece of technology.

Sure, not everything Google does was a hit. Take Wave. When Google rolled out Wave it was disappointing, but we can live with (or without) it. Some people liked it, some didn’t, the usual people whined about it, Google probably learned a lot from the launch. Nothing of significance happened. Great.

But when Buzz came about not only are people directly harmed by it but I’m afraid that progress itself will be slowed down because people who make decisions (and when you’re in the education sector, these decisions are about children) will now be less willing to take risks with Google. I doubt enough people will abandon Google’s innovations to actually make humanity as a whole go backwards in information technology, but some order of change down the line has just became negative and eventually we’ll feel its impact.

I’m not sure if any other company can have this kind of impact. Take Microsoft. If nobody trusts Windows 7 because it’s known that there’s some major privacy flaw built in we’ll just keep using XP. No big deal. The way Windows 7 handles everything isn’t completely revolutionary compared to XP. The same applies for software patches. Sometimes a new Office patch introduces a security flaw but, hey, just don’t download it and wait for the next one. It’s not like you really needed the patch to fix the garbled text in Turkish in the help file that nobody reads anyway.

Devindra reminded me of Cuil, which was described as the worst launch ever. Well, Cuil never did any damage. We poked at it, we laughed at it, and it was left to die. Some folks lost a lot of money and some folks lost a lot of time. But as a whole, society never lost anything except maybe for the ten minutes it took to make fun of Cuil displaying X-rated images for innocent searches. Buzz, that did real damage to both individuals and, in a less tangible sense, society, and it’s going to last.

Google is trying to change the game like it did with GMail and Apps and Voice and all the other stuff that I don’t use. When you say “I don’t trust Docs so I’ll just keep using Word and e-mail files back and forth” that’s a big step forwards not taken. I don’t think I can honestly defend Google anymore even when their software is the best for a situation because in applications like e-mail and document sharing privacy has a near-infinite utility value. And, well, I don’t like that.

Wing :: Feb.15.2010 :: Posts :: 4 Comments »

1. Facebook keeps showing me advertisements for masters degrees and teacher training programs. “Want a teaching job?” “Degree in one years online!” “Earn your masters online!” Sometimes it even claims that I can get a bachelor’s degree in education so I can get a teaching job. It’s reasonable (but annoying) if I was just randomly bombarded with advertisements for degrees I already have and/or don’t need through e-mail (which happens a lot). With all these targeted ads on Facebook you’d think that they can actually target correctly—for example, not selling “hey guys you can get teaching credentials in a year” ads to people who have “teacher” as their current job.

2. One of my coworkers once worked as an encyclopedia salesperson. Talking to her recently reminded me how much I loved encyclopedias because back then there was no Internet. Being curious I wanted to see if people actually still sold encyclopedias nowadays. Did you know that if you Googled the word “encyclopedia” the first three results are online encyclopedias and the fourth is the Wikipedia article on encyclopedias? The current Encyclopedia Britannica has about 32,000 pages. At 1 cent a sheet of paper 32,000 sheets of paper costs about the same as three 1TB hard drives (or 1 netbook computer with a .1TB hard drive).

2.5. It’s been a while since internal one terabyte hard drives cost over $100. Now, if you look carefully you can even get an external one for under $100. I’ve been spending the last few weeks making and editing videos and I’m still nowhere near by 2GB Dropbox limit thanks to good lossless codecs. Maybe one day I will need a 1TB drive; but by that point they probably won’t even sell them anymore and the world would have moved on to 10TB drives or something.

Wing :: Nov.29.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »