The VilleBook: Understanding the Phenomenon

Image via Wikipedia

For few years now, Facebook was overwhelmed by gamers. And it wouldn't be bad if these were regular, PC or console gamers. But no. Some random dudes got the Idea: Hey, let's make a game that involves spamming people's Facebooks with random messages! And, surprisingly, it worked. Nobody knows how or why, but it does.
However, after some time these games were up, scientists came up with an explanation: *Ville players are being subjected to a Skinner "treatment". Let's see how it's done.

Clever ways to advertise


*Villes work like this: A player posts a shitload of messages with every click, and floods their wall with basically ads for the game. It looks like this:

Pictured: Multiple Game Addict's account

And it goes straight on for 3 pages. Can you spot how many games does this person play? 3? What about 10? And I still haven't counted them all! Most of this person's posts are game spams. And it gets better, because there are fucking images added to it. And yes, people fall for it. It's kind of like if some we see certain images too often, they're imprinted in our brains... Because text doesn't work, does it? We have to learn to understand text. But images work immediately. And so, 250 cheesy images later, people will finally click the link to try it. And that's how they enter...

The Skinner Box

The game itself is designed to be as addicting as heroin on crack drinking moonshine. I'll use the case study of FarmVille as an example.
In FarmVille, you're a farmer who buys seeds, plants them, and then harvests them for some virtual coins. You have to do it in time, or else they whither. Comparing to Skinner box, you're the rat pressing buttons so food pops out, but you have to keep pressing them unless you want to be unpleasantly treated with 200 volts from the floor. And that's how the game keeps you going.