What do games do, and what's wrong with Farmville?

Linked to by Hacker News: a defense of Farmville and similar casual games.

I see three problems with the author's analysis:

1. Market fundamentalism is incorrect. People are not omniscient and are not perfectly self-controlled (I seem to recall that Ayn Rand tried to deny Aristotle and accidentally claimed omniscience for everyone). Even if people were, we would not be the rational actors, the "homo economicus," of the economists; see Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for further discussion of purely economic motives, and consider the results of the Ultimatum Game.

John Stuart Mill understood perfectly well that "Homo economicus" is a simplification for theoretical modeling; later generations of economists have ignored him, and have Flanderized the concept into something that tries to predict real human behaviors.

2. Classical music is not "pure music" created for the sake of the art; it's 17th and 18th century popular music, which attracted some very talented individuals and has enjoyed the prestige they conferred on it ever since. Remember the story about Beethoven's setting of the "Ode to Joy" in the 9th Symphony -- the first violinist grasping the deaf composer's shoulder, and turning him around to see the thunderous applause of a packed concert hall? This is not something that happens in the rarefied, aristocratic world of art for art's sake; this indicates that this really was a popular idiom.

This goes double for opera; the culture of movies -- the glamor, the vain stars, the vainglorious directors -- was present in opera first. Richard Wagner was a tyrannical genius director on a scale that not even Hitchcock approached.

3. Entertainment is not just about entertainment. Aristotle pointed out the importance of catharsis, of the intensifying and purging of emotions; I would also add that well-done fiction gives the reader life experiences which it would be impractical, impossible, illegal, tedious, or dangerous for the reader to acquire on his own. This experience is acquired more keenly in games than in anything else -- only in games does the reader speak of the main character's actions as "what I did," rather than "what he did."

Games are also extremely educational -- you can't help but learn about a game's setting when playing it; so set the game in the real world (Rise of the Phoenix, Age of Empires 2, Dynasty Warriors) to give the reader a lot of specialist knowledge in a hurry.

So, the ideal game is one which provides catharsis, gives life experiences, and teaches about a subject; Farmville's clickfest style does none of these three, so we can call it an inferior game.