I Hate You Facebook Games

Over the past few months I've come to loathe any and all Facebook games. Between the constant pressure to uselessly bloat your status updates with notifications about leveling or found items, and the minimal amount of actual entertainment value, there is very little worthwhile about these games.

First of all, calling these flash applications “games” is really a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. They require no strategy or skill beyond being able to move the mouse around the screen. The one advantage to them is that they take up almost no major time commitments as long as you are willing to log into the game several times daily for about five minutes of 'play' time. However, if you're looking for something to immerse yourself in, well, then just move along. These 'games' don't even outrank the board games I buy for my three year old.

Secondly, and for reasons I don't fully grasp, it appears that there are two main goals of the people who develop these atrocities. The first being to make you part with your real-life, hard earned money in order to purchase their game currency to get exclusive pixel items. It should be noted that almost all of these fabulous items are PURE DECORATION! That's right, they don't build stats, or make your pixel place more popular, or even help you cook that stupid food faster. It's simply bad, and often goofy looking, decorations for your place drawn up in horrible 16 bit graphics. If I had my way all the people that have plunked down cash for these trappings should be culled, and hopefully we can prevent their corrupted DNA from continuing to pollute the gene pool.

Thanks to the cash for pixel crap goal, the need to get more and more people to play these games is increased. After all, if one in twenty people will key in their credit card number for that stuff, then you need to pull in as many groups of twenty as you possibly can. So, if you have no game or entertainment to offer, and there is no reward for participating, then how do you get people to sign up to play? Peer pressure. You can't advance, or have access to, or use certain things in these games unless you have more friends playing. You are then prompted to whore out your friends (some friend you are) by inviting them to play this wonderific game that truly sucks, and you know it. Then there are the pop ups to invite friends, tell friends how much fun fun fun this particular game is, let them know you've leveled up, let them know you've just bought the pink kitten statue of misfortune, tell them how your food spoiled, your crops died, your left shoe is missing... it just goes on and on.

The real bitch of it all is that this is exactly how I started playing these 'games' in the first place. I believe my train of thought was something like, “oh, friend x claims he needs my help in game y. I like games. Maybe this could be fun. Plus, I really like helping friends. Sure I'll play.” After clicking the little accept button I'm then walked through how to play the game. It takes all of thirty seconds to explain how to play. This doesn't bode well for a game. It takes all of one round of playing to figure out that there is no game to these games. It's simply a matter of logging in your five minutes here and there to collect money to then buy more decorations – that suck.

As if dragging your friends into the deepest pits of hell and boredom wasn't enough, you can also send your friends little gifts that they can use in these games to make their playing that much more enjoyable. Not to mention the fact that sending these gifts alleviates a small portion of the overwhelming guilt you should be suffering for making them play your favorite suckfest.

A rant inside a rant – I fully accept that these games suck, and by even playing them at all you are essentially proclaiming your insanity to the world. However, I do have a problem with the people that never send out the free gifts to their friends. I simply fail to understand how it's asking too much of you to send FREE items to your friends. It's all of a one minute intrusion into your life to click out some gifts. If you can't be generous with FREE stuff then you have some serious issues that should be addressed with shock therapy.

Finally, and probably the worst part of it all, I'm level 25 – 50 something in many of these games. That's right, the game sucks and yet I've leveled my ass off in them. Why? I DON'T KNOW! Well, to be fair, I kind of do know. You see, I suffer from gamer OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). After well over two decades of gaming on both consoles and pc's I'm well trained in the Skinner Box. For those of you who are wondering what the hell a Skinner Box is, in short, Skinner was a scientist who discovered that if you put lab animals in a box with simple tasks to complete in order to get a reward (like a food pellet) they will be quickly trained to repeat that task over and over until death in order to get that reward. Even if the reward sucks, and in some cases, even if it never rewards them again. So basically, once you tell me that I can level in something I'm hooked. I believe my thought process is something like this, “Omg! You can LEVEL in this craptacular game?! Dammit! Now I'll never get off this hampster wheel of mind numbing bullshit!”