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."

Comments

Too simple.

[dintech]

Pirates and Ninjas is only very a game for very small values of fun. Call me when there's something more substatial

Re:Too simple.

[Phase Shifter]

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.

Bullshit from the "industry pundits"

[pandrijeczko]

Why do these overpaid idiots have this strange idea that "social gaming", even in computer terms, is anything new?

In the late 1980s, my friends and I were playing games like "Stunt Car Racer" on Commodore Amigas connected via their serial ports and organising complex but drunken "Speedball 2" leagues after a few beers at the weekend.

Then just go forward a few years and many of us were "secretly" playing networked "Doom" in our offices.

It really annoys me that these people are so shallow in their thinking that they don't see social computer gaming as really nothing more than an extension of simple "board" games with stones and pebbles that have been played for thousands of years.

Either that, or they are just preparing to make themselves very rich by trying to convince the rest of us that it's perfectly normal to be enjoying a few games with friends while being constantly bombarded with marketing and advertising crap.

Please go do some research, folks, instead of reading the utter nonsense in the main article. Most computer games are crap but gaming with others is a great thing, provided everyone is happy to do it just to have a good time, rather than being focused on winning and cheating which just ruins the fun of everyone involved. And there are thousands upon thousands of great games out there, many of which can be had for free, that are great fun to play with a few good friends and won't constantly bombard you with adverts for iPhones or other useless gadgets.

Re:Bullshit from the "industry pundits"

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that they're not talking about you and your buddies with your networked Amigas. By definition, you are computer geeks, which already means you have a very high chance of being a fairly hardcore gamer. They're not targeting you at all. They're going after the Soccer Moms, Stay at Home Housewives, all the non-technical people out there. And guess what. They outnumber the computer geeks by a large margin, and are an enormous untapped market. Yes, it's sad that these people aren't focusing on how fun the game is. Then again, I can almost guarantee that gamers on Slashdot would tell them that some of these runaway hits are no fun at all, and that there's no market for them. Of course, the reality of the situation only proves the Slashdotters wrong (yet again).

Re:Bullshit from the "industry pundits"

[tehSpork]

The general market is easily entertained and companies will sell to them as much as possible. Why spend big $$$ to please the /. geek living in his mother's basement when you can pay a college dropout next to nothing to develop a series of pointless little web games that will appeal to a much larger (and less discerning) audience.

This is the same logic used in the film industry, though in all fairness the film industry is at least starting to realize that there are more geeks than previously thought and trying to compensate for it (see also: LOTR, Batman, Watchmen).

Re:Bullshit from the "industry pundits"

[stonewallred]

Eh, I do have a facebook account and a myspace account. When I add someone to my friends list, they are actually a person who I interact with two or three times a week away from the computer, or in a couple of cases, people I interact with during two weekends a year when we all gather at the beach or the mountains. Not everyone uses the social sites as a place to see how many names they can get on their "friends" list. I find that facebook is a great place to keep updated, engage in conversation and coordinate events with my friends and exchange ideas. It is not a place I play games at though. Facebook has become that meeting area between phone calls, texts and emails, where communication is deeper than texts, more thought out than phone calls, and actually quicker than emails most times. YMMV

Re:Bullshit from the "industry pundits"

[Deanalator]

I think you fail at grasping the concept. Social networking games are more than just playing games with friends. This is not even about playing scrabble with some friends over facebook. These new social network games take advantage of a currently deployed social network of friends, and use them to spread. For example, the vampire game. When you bite friends of yours that aren't playing the game, you get a bonus, and they get an invite to join the game. If they do join, you get another bonus, and you have someone to help you complete quests or whatever. This is also different from classical online games, because when you join, you start out with a list of friends that also play the game, as opposed to the chat room environment where there is more of a chance of meeting new people.

In the end, it really is more of a marketing strategy than anything else, but it's a marketing strategy that propels itself, and the users enjoy participating in. Like a pyramid scheme with cooler graphics.

That's backwards

[jamesl]

It is and has been, "Gaming Platforms as Social Networks."

Less griefers

[Culture20]

The one benefit I can see with social networks as a game platform: griefers will be less common since they thrive in anonymity. Although, a friend's wife constantly griefs him when we play Settlers of Catan (her goal is to make him not win)...

Let them screw up if they want to

[tygerstripes]

The film industry, pretty much from the start, was plagued by concerns over markets and metrics - targeting their films to capture the largest "typical" audience rather than just trying to make good films. Usually, when someone set out with the noble intention of quite simply making a great film, they would surprise and shake up the industry, and the marketing gurus were left with their cocks in their hands, going "Wow, there's a whole market dollar we didn't think of there," and suddenly the studios are churning out flicks to appeal to that audience instead.

Bill Hicks certainly had a few things to say about the crooked industry of marketing.

So now we have the same problem with the games industry, and it's been documented in all sorts of ways. Who's the saviour? Independent developers, of course. Make something new, fun, addictive - even on a low budget - and suddenly the big boys are less afraid to stick their necks out.

Independent developers are fulfilling the same role as independent film-makers have been doing for years, and they're an inevitable product of the current money-grabbing system. "The topics of fun or creativity were rarely if ever addressed." Well, strike the light...

Re:Let them screw up if they want to

[pandrijeczko]

Bill Hicks certainly had a few things to say about the crooked industry of marketing.

It's a shame that the passing of a man of such talent was not mourned by as many people as are mourning that strange and plasticized record company money-making machine that died last night.

As for games, I'd love to see the indie developers save the gaming industry because ultimately that's where it all started from.

Unfortunately, the sheeple will just go and buy what the adverts tell them to buy because they are all too mesmerized by pretty graphics and screaming brats demanding the latest games consoles and titles. Despite a global recession, many people still have far too much disposable income and therefore don't feel the need to worry too much about how they spend their money - it becomes far more important that they stay in with the in-crowd and not have little Johnny throwing a tantrum at home because everybody in his class has "Totally Derivative Game Sequel Part 5" except him.

Maybe if the recession bites deeper and people really have to start making every penny count, then we'll see a return to talented film-makers, musicians and games creators getting the rewards that they deserve because the general populace has had to become more discerning. But the fact is that at the moment, the big media companies have all of the control and power, and will just stamp on anything that stops them enjoying their vast profits for churning out crap.

Why can't I just use a social network...

[sherl0k]

for social networking? Is that too much to ask for?

I won at Facebook.

[Penguin]

The end of level monster is pretty hard.