The Secret Dealer for Farmville Addicts

The company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville doesn't like to talk about the sad addicts who fuel its profits. But it does quietly run a special store for them, where imaginary credits are bought with very real bank transfers.

The minimum purchase in Zynga's underground "Platinum Purchase Program" is $500, payable by wire transfer (see email below). The reward over buying online with your credit card: Extra points with which to buy virtual goods for the company's Facebook games. If you refer a friend to the program, you get even more points. Zynga, meanwhile, gets word of mouth, which is especially important since Zynga keeps this bulk sales program hush hush; it's not mentioned on the company website, nor within its games. If you Google for it, you'll get a few complaints for disgruntled customers and a couple of posts from a blogger named "Loot Lady," who writes that it was "hard to find a lot of information out about this" program.

Well, naturally. With top-drawer partners like Apple and Google, Zynga is not going to be keen to draw attention to how much of its profits come from obsessive online gaming junkies, many of them underaged or low income, like the unemployed disabled man the New York Times discovered was spending 16 hous a day on Zynga's YoVille.

But it is keen to tap the market. Indeed, when it comes to game design, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus has a predatory attitude toward gamers, and has told his programmers that pumping up profits is more important than the experience of actually playing the game, ex employees say in an excellent new SF Weekly cover story. Disillusioned employees have even reportedly given Zynga an unofficial motto: "Do Evil," an inversion of Google's informal slogan "Don't be evil."

Having explicitly aimed to get people addicted to its mindless, low-quality games — SF Weekly writes that titles like Zynga's are built around a "compulsion loop," which sounds about right — Zynga's not just going to leave money on the table. By setting up a non-refundable, bank-to-bank transfer program, as documented in the Zynga email we obtained and have reproduced below, the company can avoid giving a cut of the revenue to credit card companies and processors. More importantly, the program allows gaming addicts to feed their addictions more conveniently; on Facebook Zynga's game stores can top out at $50 or $200 in virtual credit at a time, effectively turning away the company's best customers.

It's not a pretty notion, the idea of grown humans throwing huge quantities of perfectly good money into electronic addictions. Then again, it's not exactly novel one, either. Zynga deserves credit, at the very least, for going with the tried and true solution of keeping its junkie-serving business in the shadows, rather than throwing it onto the open web in some misguided gesture of transparency. Drug dealers have been doing it this way for centuries, with good reason.

Image: Gawker

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-dealer-for-farmville-addicts-evil-corporations-in-action-2010-9#ixzz0zhz9DnbJ

South Korea Cracks Down on Gaming Addiction

courtesy of Time

Ever since Yoon Hyuk-joo, a 16-year-old in Seoul, started playing the popular computer game StarCraft eight years ago, studying has taken the backseat. For six hours every day in dim, smoky Internet cafés known in the South Korean capital as "PC Bangs," Yoon leads a squad of soldiers in Battlefield Online and then maims the undead in Counter-Strike: Zombies. His idols aren't your usual baseball players or pop-music stars: the high school student looks to inspiration from Lim Yo-hwan, known in South Korea as "the Emperor." Lim is one of the most successful professional StarCraft players of all time, whose celebrity has spurred fans to label him and his actress girlfriend as the South Korean equivalent of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

But in a country where video-game champions live like rock stars, Yoon concedes that too many teenagers are getting hooked on the hobby. He was pleased last week when the government ordered what it calls a "nighttime shutdown" for gamers: the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism directed the operators of the three most popular games to block people under age 18 from playing games between midnight and 8 a.m. starting in September. Another rule will significantly slow down the Internet connections of young players if they engage for too many hours into the night, rendering the more graphics-intensive games unplayable, and several other bills are pending in the National Assembly that could restrict kids' gaming habits even further. "It's a great idea," says Yoon. "Video-game addiction is having bad effects on our generation. The kids have to study and grow up eventually."

(See pictures of South Korean video gamers.)

South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world, but that connectivity comes with a price. Since the early 2000s, occasional reports of compulsive gamers dying or murdering loved ones to satisfy their addiction have raised hackles at the industry, a domestic market valued at about $2.4 billion in which 30 million people are thought to play regularly. The government introduced the recent nighttime shutdown one month after police discovered a 3-month-old baby who starved to death while her parents were busy nurturing their virtual baby on a game at an Internet café.

The curfew also comes one month after the Korean e-Sports Players Association, a governing body of professional computer-game sports, reportedly filed charges against a group of retired StarCraft players and officials for allegedly manipulating the betting system — a testament to how seriously some Koreans have come to take the game. In February, a 22-year-old Korean man was charged with murdering his mother after she pestered him to stop playing. And in 2005, in one of the most famous cases, a 28-year-old man went into cardiac arrest and died after playing StarCraft for 50 hours straight, with only a few bathroom breaks. That was a particularly bad year for the country, when 10 people died from related causes to video-game addiction.

Psychologists estimate that 10% of South Korean schoolchildren have shown signs of video-game addiction, thought by some psychiatrists to be one of the highest rates in the world, along with that of China. Video-game addiction — though not officially recognized in the U.S. by the American Psychological Association — typically includes symptoms like becoming withdrawn or angry when not allowed to play. Severe cases can result in addicts' simply not eating or sleeping until they're back on their binge. For years, South Korea has been at the forefront of treating the disorder. In 2002, before the issue had risen to global prominence, the government opened one of the region's first Internet-addiction treatment centers, perched away in the countryside. Since then, hundreds of private hospitals and clinics in the country have opened specialized units to treat the disorder, and the government even opened a hotline for gaming addicts in 2006. At the treatment centers, patients typically spend two weeks or more detoxing from video games by partaking in outdoor activities and arts and crafts. They also discuss with counselors the problems that video games have created for their health and social lives, supposedly releasing their anxiety.

Gamer Sues World of Warcraft for Ruining His Life

courtesy of appscout

A California-based gamer is suing World of Warcraft maker Activision Blizzard for ruining his life.

Erik Estavillo is accusing the publisher of maintaining a "harmful virtual environment" via "sneaky and deceitful practices," according to GameSpot.

Among other things, Estavillo is annoyed by the monthly $14.99 access fee, the speed at which players can move within the game, WoW's player resurrection process, as well as charges Blizzard requires for players to change things about their characters.

The player also claims that he has developed physical and mental ailments as a result of his WoW playing. Estavillo said he does not want to end up like an EverQuest player who committed suicide in 2001 over a sense of alienation brought on by playing games, according to the suit obtained by GameSpot.

This is not the first time Estavillo has sued a gaming company, however. He sued Sony's PlayStation network for a violation of his First Amendment rights after he was banned during a game of Resistance: Fall of Man. A judge dismissed that case in September. He has also sued Microsoft and Nintendo because a broken Xbox caused him undue stress and a Wii blocked access to a third-party program he wanted.