Look no further than the extraordinary backlash against Diablo 3 to see the problem with that "compulsion loop" applied against modern gamers.

To be honest, I don't think the problem is necessarily with the compulsion loop itself (Diablo 2 had no such backlash). But when combined with a real-money "Paid Advantage" model, it creates a huge populist backlash against the game.

WoW was/ is somewhat like that, if you wanted to get the best gear/ achievements in the game you would have to play many hours daily to keep up with points, clear the top level raids etc.

Now that I run my own businesses I am definitely after something I can pickup when I have a bit of time and not have it become a chore.

Zynga products are games. (Note: I'm 100% anti-Zynga, but I'm also something of an amateur game theorist. Thus, this will be a bit pedantic.) Zynga products are essentially casino games (which are also compulsion loops) but reinvented for social media. Zynga differs from the casino in two essential ways: (1) instead of being driven by thrill and desperate hope, the compulsion loop is built on peer pressure and sunk costs; (2) instead of being a consummate pseudo-elite luxury experience, it's a habit-forming and largely pointless chore.

Poker (Disclaimer: I have not played Zynga Poker; I'm inferring) doesn't succeed because it's somehow more of a "real game"; Poker succeeds because it's better crafted, largely by years of free play testing in the real world. While in other Zynga products, you're made to feel like you're building up to something, you aren't in Poker. This means that the "user gratification [being] squeezed" is effectively infinite: the false hope being offered is far more acceptable. Poker is older than the Internet.

If you plunge deep into the ivory tower of the games business, sure, you'll find that the term "game" is very hard to lock down properly. You'll probably even find a useful definition that manages to exclude Zynga products without excluding sensible games. But you'll also inevitably find it is full of problems anyways. In the larger picture, Zynga products are games. They're well-designed for the short-sightedness that they're meant for: making money for Zynga in the present: but as you say, that short-sightedness is likely to bite them in the end.

Any definition of "game" that is inclusive of casino games can pretty much encompass any process that has steps that are done in turn. They are simply spaced doses of reward and punishment doled out by a random number generator.

Poker, like you said, is not a casino game. It can be made into a casino game, as long as you remove all opponents and rearrange the rules to make it a constantly losing proposition.

What you're talking about is what distinguishes a good game from a bad game, an ethical game from an unethical game, an interesting game from an uninteresting game, and so on. You do not, in fact, distinguish a game from a not-game.

Would you call drinking games a kind of game? Dear Esther? Sim City? This is rhetorical; you probably wouldn't. But other people would, and there's no clear reason why they're wrong.

>distinguish a game from a not-game.

A not-game can be played without you. Your only choices are to watch and/or lose.

>Would you call drinking games a kind of game? Dear Esther? Sim City? This is rhetorical; you probably wouldn't. But other people would, and there's no clear reason why they're wrong.

Depends on what drinking game - if it's a drinking game in which there's only zero or one rational way to behave, it's just drinking, not a drinking game. Example: if it's a game where you pick a number, then roll a die, and if you roll the number you picked, you drink, no, it's not a game.

I know an awful lot of drinking games that are games. I can't recall one that isn't, other than the "watch X and when they say Y, drink" game. That's not a game. But it can easily be made a game by having each player choose a particular word.

I don't know what Dear Esther is.

Sim City is not a game, it's a simulation of a city. It's no more a game than building a model airplane or painting a landscape. Setting any particular goal within Sim City and achieving it is a game - just like the facebook stuff.

Casino games are completely different, though. The only object in a casino game is to gain money, and the rules reduce to: "Every 10 minutes, we will take a five dollar bill out of your pocket." They rely on a combination of the misguided common sense "law of averages" heuristic that people carry plus the illusion of control to create the dramatic rhythm that people expect from a game. They prey on an ignorance of statistics and primitive beliefs in magical qualities to keep them there. Not games. Victimization of average people by organized crime and cash-hungry governments more like it. If video poker is legal, I'm not sure why three-card monte isn't, other than it makes everything too obvious.

This is acceptable as part of a constellation of definitions. Some people disagree that agency, rather than interactivity, is the defining attribute of a game. Some people disagree that victory conditions, achievable or not, are necessary. What makes your definition right, and theirs wrong?

But... this definition says that Tetris is not a game. It doesn't matter what you do in Tetris; you're just delaying the inevitable loss. How does your definition distinguish casino not-games from Tetris? (I am assuming, of course, that you consider Tetris to be a game.)

> Casino games are completely different, though.

This paragraph is an ethical (and possibly a legal) argument. Just because they're unethical does not make them not-games, unless you specifically include ethics in your definition. I fully agree that bad ethics are bad, but that's not the point. Ultimately, I have to quote you:

> It's a game, but I don't see it as ethical.

I'd be hesitant to quantify over the entire space of "Zynga product", because the average adult human produces 1 to 1.5 pounds of Zynga product per day.