Game of Lies
I’ve been bored a bit, recently. And what website do people go to when they’re bored?
Exactly. Facebook.
Yeah, I know Facebook is a piece of privacy-unfriendly crap (in friendly terms), and personally, I don’t really use it anyway. But it has games, and those games tend to be kind of addictive, and marginally entertaining.
One game I’ve been playing a lot (and getting quite good at) is Tetris Battle. For those educated folks who aren’t familiar with it: it’s tetris, except that you play it against other people. In the basic variant, you play against a single other person, and your goal is to knock the opponent out (ie, making his playing field fill up so that he can’t place any new blocks). To do this, you clear lines yourself, which puts ‘garbage’ lines at the bottom of the opponent’s playing field. If you receive those garbage lines yourself, there’s one block in that line, of you place another block yourself that touches that particular block, the garbage line clears away. There’s also a four-player variant, where the goal is to clear 40 lines as fast as you can.
Anyway. You’re supposed to be playing against other players. If you have friends on Facebook who play it, you can invite them so you can play against eachother. But other than that, the game is a load of bullcrap. You’re not playing against actual people at all.
Well, you probably see the names, profile pictures and actual statistics of people who are really on Facebook and really play it, but you’re not actually playing against them at the moment. The game obviously doesn’t say this, but there are a bunch of things that give it away.
- First of all, timezones. I’ve played hundreds of games, and lots of them against Asian people. Which is fine, except that most of the time when I’m playing, it’s something like 4 AM over in China.
- Pausing. I can pause the game anytime, and either I have to resume it within 30 seconds, or it continues automatically. I occasionally pause the game to write a message on some instant messaging program or to do some other quick task. In my hundreds of games, it has never happened that the opposing player paused the game.
- Starting the game. Typically, for a multiplayer game, all players have to indicate that they are ready before the game actually starts. However, every time when I click the ‘START’ button, the game starts instantly. This would require that the other player has already clicked ‘START” himself as well (which is unlikely, since I’ve never had to wait for ANY of my 500+ games), or that his START button is grayed out and the game just starts when I click START (which would mean that on occassion I would have to wait for the other player to start the game, which also, never happened).
- In addition to #3, the opposite player appears to have infinite patience. It doesn’t matter if I start the game directly, or wait half an hour. He’ll just sit there and wait until I’ve started.
- Depending on their rank, players invariably use the exact same tactics and perform about equally well. Every single rank 20 or higher opponent that I’ve faced so far uses the same technique where you first build up a lot of blocks in about three quarters of the width of the playing field, and then quickly clear all those lines, so that the opponent receives a lot of garbage lines very quickly. They do this without any variation, and they are always players at rank 20 or above. Players below rank 20 never use it.
- Similarly, in the four player games, it very frequently happens that one or two of the opponents play so incredibly slow and incredibly poorly that it’s a miracle that they ever got to the rank they appear to be on at all. If they play all their games like that, they should hardly have been able to get past rank 5 or 10.
- Regardless of how poor your internet connection is at the moment, or how much stuff you’re downloading at the time, the game never has any lag while you’re playing it (or at least, not unless you play against friends).
In short, the game is a fraud. Unless you actually invite friends to play against you, you just see some random player’s name and picture and the rest is all artificial.
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