Tag: farmville

Further evidence that Farmville is evil

Farmville

Excellent blog post on Lifehacker, adds nicely to the evidence of decryption.

If FarmVille isn’t all that great of a game, why do people play it? It’s the same reason people go on vacations they’re not really looking forward to. The "sunk cost fallacy" is a strong, almost primordial thing, and it helps to understand it.

You Are Not So Smart, the go-to blog for understanding why we all do silly things, tackles the psychological roots of sunk cost. Put simply, it’s the feeling of "I’ve already spent X, so I’d better spend Y to salvage it." David McRaney’s post makes good sense of how FarmVille is a master manipulator of the sunk cost emotion.

Could farmville be the cruel deception?

Sherry Turkle

I still love IT Conversations for programmes like Tech Nation, I had never heard of Sherry Turkle till today (or at least I’d never paid attention).

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and MIT Professor, Sherry Turkle, about her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. In it, she talks about how peoples relationships with their devices is effective their human relationships.

In the interview Sherry talks about her book (which I’m thinking about buying as my first Kindle DRM ebook) and at the end she gets on to the subject of the cruel deception of live enough AI.

I’ve discussed to death the onslaught of social games on Facebook and other systems and my ultimate hate for them but it was on the techgrumps podcast. When Sherry mentioned the cruel deception of live enough AI, this for me is exactly that and one of the saddest things you can imagine.

The notion of grandparents using farmville because they were too old to maintain a proper garden.

Theres no words which sums up this reality more that a cruel deception…