So one of the things that’s really funny in social games is learning how social actually helps relieve challenges or pinches in the game,” said LeTourneau. “Every game has a pinch, you know, Super Mario has a pinch, in that I only have so many lives.” (Again with the Nintendo comparisons.)P

“MMOs don’t punish you that much either, for failure in the game. Because they want you to keep playing.” Nintendo’s famous platformers have a distinct pinch, as LeTourneau points out. If you make a mistake, you lose a life and progress, and if you run out of lives, you fail and lose the game. But what exactly is the pinch of a Ville game? As I mentioned before, one of my main criticisms of Zynga’s games is that they’re so positive that they feel meaningless. Compare FarmVille 2 to SimCity, where your city can turn on you, your people can go homeless, and a fire can burn down everything you’ve built. What are you up against in FarmVille 2?P

“I’d say first and foremost, in most social games, what you’re really combatting is time,” LeTourneau said. “For example, that your crops wither if you don’t come back and take care of them. So it is really positive, the pinch is really the speed at which we progress, or really, the loss of your effort. But I think that how these games are different is that in something like Sim City, I would continually be resetting the board. I wipe out my city and I start over. These [social games] are really different. I think they’re much more almost MMO-like in that respect. Which is, how much would it suck if every time I came back to World of Warcraft, if you’d been away for a while, or if you died in a dungeon, and all of a sudden you reset to level 40. MMOs don’t punish you that much either, for failure in the game. Because they want you to keep playing.”