之前我们曾探讨各类赌场游戏及其机制如何运用至现代游戏世界中。在研究过程中，我们发现社交游戏(游戏邦注：这片市场估值72亿美元，深受全球8亿多用户的青睐)不过是1887年问世的老虎机的现代改版。
看看你是否对此感到熟悉：
为玩游戏，我们需将硬币放入机器中。然后按动按键，等待结果。当结果呈现时，我们就会听到令人兴奋的音效，看到吸引人眼球的图像，同时获得些许硬币。通常此胜利能够帮助玩家朝更大目标迈进。玩家还有机会获得超乎体验付出货币价值的稀有奖品。
这是老虎机游戏，对吧？错，这是《FarmVille》的基本操作循环机制。
下面是更详细的描述：
要种植作物，玩家需先投入资源获得种子。然后播种种子，等待他们生长。收获作物时，玩家会听到令人兴奋的音效，吸引人眼球的图像，以及些许资源。通常这些资源能够帮助我们朝更大目标迈进。玩家还有机会获得超乎所购种子价值的稀有奖品。
现在听起来更像《FarmVille》，是吧？
大家通常觉得Zynga游戏的玩法缺乏深度，但所幸其富有沉浸性，且通俗易懂。Kontagent联合创始人和CEO Jeff Tseng最近甚至在《福布斯》中称Zynga“诉诸同赌场游戏类似的心理”。那么究竟什么是赌场心理？Zynga如何平衡赌场机制，创建庞大游戏帝国？
Zynga的成功与其控制人脑的熟练技能有关。其中一个方式是Random Reward Schedule，此模式基于心理学家B.F. Skinner所做的研究。在此研究中，他发现，持续给予鸽子食物奖励会带来较少粘性。它们最终会感到厌烦，只在饿时回来。随后Skinner发现，随机给予奖励会让鸽子更频繁回访，随机设定奖励数量亦是如此。最后，他发现结合这些实验，随机设定奖励时间和数量能够有效提高粘性。Zynga和其他社交游戏公司有效将Random Reward Schedule运用至自身作品中，旨在促使用户持续回访。此外，单单参与虚拟货币的投机活动就能让用户感到兴奋。剑桥Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre的Dr. Clark运用fMRI脑部扫描测量玩家体验投机内容时的大脑活动模式。他发现用户在收到金钱奖励时脑部的可靠活动模式。研究发现对投机内容反应最多的大脑区域亦对自然强化刺激极其敏感(如食物和性)，这不足为怪。
这并不新颖，许多行业如广告，已借助性与金钱的魅力多年。Zynga只是试图利用这些心理线索探索新市场，覆盖那些从未将自己当作电子游戏玩家的定义。
这似乎有些矛盾，Zynga 游戏的2.8亿用户的覆盖面超出传统电子游戏族群。常被忽略的Zynga成功要诀是：其作品融入具有广泛吸引力的画面。Zynga凭借高质量和具有亲和力的角色掳获大量用户的芳心，达到其他公司无法匹敌的高度。正如Zynga首席游戏设计师Brian Reynolds所言，“我们制作的是迎合大众口味的娱乐内容。”
Zynga将广泛吸引力、沉浸赌博机制及大胆的病毒式传播营销渠道融为一体，进而获得惊人发展。其凭借时髦而通俗易懂的游戏作品避开赌场游戏原有的污名，同时吸引赌博爱好者的眼球。Zynga的核心用户是30-55岁的年长女性。不难想象此族群恰好是老虎机游戏的核心玩家。
但要将此转化成价值数十亿美元的帝国，Zynga需说服成千上万的用户，他们如今也有虚拟货币赌博内容，玩家可以在游戏中投入真钱。此做法的关键是创建富有吸引力的虚拟设备，供玩家在游戏中使用。社交游戏玩家清楚自己在游戏中掏真钱，但他们这么做是因为他们对游戏中的虚拟商品存在感知价值。就此来看，赌博和社交游戏玩家非常相似，因为两种游戏的玩家都知晓自己会在体验过程中消耗金钱，但他们这么做是因为觉得这完全和自己的感知价值和所获乐趣匹配。套用剑桥大学某篇关于赌博心理的文章：“就起本质看来，赌博是相当矛盾的行为，因为大家都知道‘赌场总是赢家’”。
这也解开大家多年来不解的谜团：为何越来越多玩家在毫无有形价值的虚拟商品中掏钱？从某种程度看，这些用户与每年成千上万玩老虎机玩到口袋空空的玩家不同。他们的目的不是获胜，或赢得大笔钱财——他们只是为了感受游戏的趣味。他们付出的资金就是其所获乐趣的成本。
在社交游戏虚拟货币背景下，此对比关系非常突出。购买虚拟货币的玩家通常会很快将货币花掉，因为一旦跳出游戏背景，这些就不再被视作金钱。转换后的货币不过是游戏的工具，它们同专业扑克玩家在现实世界所描述的金钱如出一辙。
Zynga曾自豪地表示自己是“乔装成游戏公司的分析公司”。我们对此有不同看法：Zynga是乔装成游戏公司的博彩业公司——且获得广泛成功。他们能够有效运用博彩机制，获得超过2亿的MAU，2011年的收益近10亿美元，其即将进行的IPO估值有望达到150-200亿美元。
不论玩家获得多少《Zynga Poker》筹码，或是多少《FarmVille》资源，他们通常都以实钱兑换虚拟货币(游戏邦注：就像其他商品交易活动)。社交游戏同赌场游戏的最大区别是玩家无法收回所投入的实际资金。若开发者能让玩家赢回所投入的时间和金钱，这将成为游戏领域的一大创举。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦)
Exposing Social Gaming’s Hidden Lever
Tyler York
In our last post, Gambling Makes Billions Without Innovation, we showed how each gambling game has spent decades or longer without a single gamplay innovation. We are following this up with a series where we outline each major type of gambling game and how their mechanics can be applied to the modern gaming world. One of the most striking things that we found in our research was that social gaming, a burgeoning $7.2 billion industry that’s beloved by over 800 million players worldwide, is merely a modern adaptation of an invention created in 1887: the slot machine。
See if this sounds familiar to you:
To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game。
That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille。
Here is the description again, but this time, with specific details:
To plant a crop, you must first spend resources on the seeds. You then plant the seeds and must wait for them to grow. When you harvest the seeds, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some resources. Often times, these resources help you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the seeds that you purchased。
That sounds more like FarmVille now, doesn’t it?
People have often argued that Zynga’s games lack gameplay depth, but make up for it in addictive, accessible mechanics. Jeff Tseng, the co-founder and CEO of Kontagent, even said that Zynga “appeals to the same psychology as gambling” in a recent Forbes article. So what exactly is the psychology of gambling? How did Zynga leverage gambling mechanics to build a massive gaming empire?
Zynga’s success has much to do with their skillfully executed manipulation of the human brain. One such method is known as the Random Reward Schedule, based on the results of a study conducted by psychologist B.F. Skinner. In this study, he found that giving pigeons a consistent food reward lead to the least engagement. They would eventually get bored and only come back when hungry. Skinner then found that randomizing whether the reward was given made the pigeons come back more often, as did randomizing the amount of the reward. Lastly, he found that combining these experiments to randomize both whether the reward would occur and how much the award was for lead to a striking increase in engagement. Zynga and other social games companies have implemented the Random Reward Schedule to great effect in their games to keep players coming back.Furthermore, just the act of engaging in gambling actions for fake money can be exciting for players. Dr. Clark from the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in Cambridge used fMRI brain scanning to measure patterns of brain activity when playing a game that involved gambling. He found a reliable pattern of brain activity when humans receive money as a reward for winning. It should be no surprise that the region of the brain (the striatum) that responds most to gambling also responds to natural reinforcing stimuli like food and sex。
This is nothing new, as numerous industries such as advertising have relied on the allure of sex and money for years. Zynga has simply managed to successfully leverage these same psychological cues to unlock a massive new market of people that had never considered themselves video gamers。
Paradoxical as it seems, many of Zynga’s 280 million players were gained far outside of what was previously considered the typical video gaming demographic. A key to Zynga’s success is something that is often overlooked: widely appealing graphics. Zynga’s high level of polish combined with approachable characters gave them mass appeal like no game company had ever achieved before. “We’re making mass-market entertainment everyone can play” says Brian Reynolds, Zynga’s chief game designer。
Zynga combines mass appeal, addictive gambling mechanics, and an aggressive viral marketing strategy to achieve incredible growth. Their stylish, highly approachable games help them avoid the stigma of gambling while appealing to precisely the audiences that are the most avid gamblers. Zynga’s core paying audience is 30-55 year old females. It should come as no surprise that this demographic overlaps almost exactly with the core audience of slot machine users。
However, to turn this into a multi-billion dollar empire, Zynga had to convince the millions of players that they now had gambling with play money to put real money into the game. The key to doing this was to build compelling virtual equipment or enhancements for players to use in-game. Social gaming players know that they are spending real money on a game, but they do so because of the perceived value of the virtual goods they are acquiring in the game. In this way, gambling and social game players are also similar, because both players know that they are losing money as they play, but they do so because their perceived value and enjoyment is worth the expense. To quote the University of Cambridge’s article on the psychology of gambling, “at its heart, gambling is a rather paradoxical behaviour because it is widely known that ‘the house always wins’。”
This is one way to explain what people have been struggling to understand for years: why do more and more people pay real money for virtual goods that have no tangible value? In a way, these users are not unlike the millions of players per year that go to play slot machines until they are out of chips. They are not playing to win or even to hit the Jackpot – they are playing for the thrill of the game. The money they set aside to play is simply the cost of a game they enjoy。
This comparison is striking when put in the context of virtual currency in social games. Players who purchase virtual currency often spend it quickly because once it crosses over, it isn’t seen as money any more. The converted currency simply becomes a tool for playing the game, which is almost word-for-word how professional poker players describe money in the real world。
Zynga proudly states that they are an “an analytics company masquerading as a games company”. We see this a bit differently: Zynga is a gambling company masquerading as a new form of games company – and a wildly successful one at that. Their ability to leverage gambling mechanics has earned them over 200 million monthly active users, almost $1 billion in revenue in 2011, and a potential $15-20 billion valuation in their pending IPO。
No matter the volume of Zynga Poker chips a player earns, or FarmVille resources a player accumulates, their real money has been exchanged for virtual currency, just like an other cash-for-goods transaction. The biggest thing that unequivocally separates social gaming from gambling is that the players have no ability to tangibly recoup the money put into the game. By giving players the ability to win back their investment of time and money in real-money rewards, that would quite literally be a game changer。(Source：altdevblogaday)