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Social Networks As Gaming Platforms
Gamasutra is running a few articles about this year's Social Gaming Summit, a conference dedicated to how the increasingly popular social media market is influencing the design of games and how they are played. It's a unique market, in which relatively unknown games can attract millions of players over mere weeks, and where the players themselves often become the distributors. When discussing platform support and compatibility, Sebastian de Halleux, COO of developer Playfish, said, "For us, the next-generation platform is Facebook." However, Facebook's own Gareth Davis thinks the future of gaming will rely heavily on compatibility across many different devices, from conventional consoles to devices like the iPhone. Christian Nutt, the Gamasutra writer who attended the Summit, is optimistic about the possibilities this will open up, but is worried that creativity and fun will get bogged down by traffic analysis, marketing, and micro-transactions. He mentions one company who "spent $2 million developing a game called Guild of Heroes, but never launched it because 'it didn't drive the right metrics.' This makes business sense; these kinds of decisions are made everywhere all of the time. The disquieting thing is that the topics of fun or creativity — or any of the virtues most in the game industry like to inject into their commercial products — were rarely if ever addressed."
It is and has been, "Gaming Platforms as Social Networks."
Mod parent up as insightful, please.
From what I've seen, most gaming on social websites is not good gaming at all.
Rather, only three ways to advance toward "winning" exist. The first, "using strategy", becomes utterly useless after at most a day or two unless you employ the others. The second, "selling my online identity or shelling out cash to sponsors for game points", goes further, but has a great cost. Still, your progress runs into a brick wall unless you use the third method "spamming alliance invitations to people I've never met and have no interest in outside the game." Ultimately you have no contact with these people other than receiving invitation spam for multiple games, and the spam eventually overwhelms any attempt at communication with nongamer contacts (family, friends, people from work) that were the only incentive for joining the social network in the first place.
TL:DR?
"Games" on social networks have no value as games, and eliminate any possible value of the social networks themselves. Goatse is clearly the winner.