The GDC 2011 panel may have been officially titled A Debate: Are Social Games Legitimate but moderator Margaret Robertson started off by telling the audience that the
NBA Live Coins panelists wanted to center the debate on a question they were more conceptually comfortable with: Are social games evil?Georgia Institute of Technology researcher and Cow Clicker creator Ian Bogost certainly seemed to think that social gaming was at least insidious, if not outright
. He compared the slowly creeping effects of social networks and games to that of the omnipresent high-fructose corn syrup that's been pushed into nearly every food product for
NBA 2K18 VC Points a number of reasons.I wonder if Facebook is doing for friendship what [agriculture conglomerate] ADM is doing for cheap sweeteners, he said. It's turning people into resources, like ADM does for corn, and people become these resources that are changed into industrial value as
as possible.Daniel James, co-founder and CEO of Puzzle Pirates developer Three Rings, said social game makers had to be careful to create their games ethically, with an eye towards creating deep, meaningful connected experiences rather than just glorified slot machines.If you look at a row of people putting money into a slot
, they're not really smiling, he said. Nabeel Hyatt, of recent Zynga acquisition Conduit Labs, shared an anecdote about an office manager that plays Cafe World in weekly meetings with four or five real friends as proof that social games, far from being evil, instead provide real social value and real happiness to
nba18mt their lives.ZipZapPlay's Curt Bererton agreed that social game makers should focus less on dirty monetization tricks and more on features that
