My response to Ethan Levy's talk "Game Design is Business Design"

I recently checked out the Ethan Levy talk and found it absolutely fascinating. I was especially interested in his emotional motivations behind monetization. I noticed that very few of them were synonyms for fun or happiness. Exhilaration is misleading as it refers to luck rather than performance. Even more interesting is that the process, or act, of playing the game, is not mentioned.

Emotion is the Key to Monetization• Impatience “I want this now.”• Revenge “I want payback.”• Dominance “I want to be the best.”• Jealousy “I want what he has.”• Accomplishment “I want that medal.”• Exhilaration “I want to open another pack.”• Belonging “I want to be part of something.”

All of these key emotions are derived from the "meta" game mechanics. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that when designers focus on monetization they are very literally doing it at the expense (man hours in this case) of the actual game mechanics. 

To me, all of these emotions are more valuable when earned. If these emotions are more appealing being bought rather than earned, it is either a failure of the game mechanics to be captivating or an overwhelming success in metagame design. Probably both.

Now this is not to say I am opposed to making money. In fact, as I write this, I feel like an old man shaking his cane and those young whippersnappers saying, "Back in my day!" Am I a dinosaur of a very young medium complaining about new stuff because the (gaming) world used to revolve around my target demographic? Probably. Am I alone in thinking F2P social game monetization is the antithesis of what games should be about? Definitely not. So with that grain of salt, I propose the quandary of how to monetize gameplay is unsolved.

And unsolved problems are the best kind.