gameslol

Do you play games on FaceBook? It turns out quite a lot of people do. The current most popular game, Vampires, has almost 440,000 daily active users. I’ve tried a couple of these widget games and although as a gamer I don’t find them particularly compelling, the size of their player-bases is certainly noteworthy. What interests me even more are the game design possibilities that exist within social networks.

In 2005 I worked on Mobstar, an asynchronous multiplayer browser game that’s still fairly popular particularly in the UK and The Netherlands. It’s a typical example of the “walled garden” approach used by most non-casual web games. Everything is locked away behind a login, meaning there’s no way to play or even preview the game without signing up. Once you are a registered player, you still need to remember to check back regularly to see your progress.

It’s pretty tough to get people to sign up and commit themselves to a game like that. It hasn’t stopped companies like BigPoint from becoming successful in this genre, but it still seems like an awkward and decidedly ‘web 1.0′ way of making games. In later projects that I worked or consulted on we always had a lot of discussion about how to make MMO style web games more open and distributed.

With that in mind, recent developments in social networks are worth following. Because if most web games are walled gardens, then social network games are more like public parks. You can easily see someone is participating in a widget game simply by checking their profile page. Inviting others to join is also easy. And you don’t have to remember to check the status of your game, because you’re regularly logging into the network anyway. Because widget games can piggy-back a network’s existing logins, profile information and contacts, it takes away a lot of barriers. Widget games also tend to spread around really fast thanks to the ease at which you can invite your friends.

Integrating an app (or indeed a game) into a social network is only possible on FaceBook and Ning at the moment, as far as I’m aware. But the OpenSocial API announced by Google last week will soon enable integrated apps on virtually all major networks, creating an estimated combined audience of over 100 million people. More importantly, OpenSocial will allow developers to write their social app once without having to tailor different versions to different APIs.

I’m sure someone out there is already working on an Urban Dead style game for FaceBook, or at least something that’s a bit more fleshed out than those silly vampire bite or pirates vs. ninjas recruitment spam games that people will inevitably get sick of soon. But conventional maffia/pirates/zombie/ninja web games are definitely not the best you can do in this context. Sure, it would be cool to create a game like that, but I imagine the killer app game on social networks to be something else.

What if you put a social game on a social network? Let’s say, Animal Crossing. If you could, would you want to play Animal Crossing with friends who don’t have a console but who do have a PC with internet connection? Of course you would. Social networks can be pretty boring after a while, but they’d be a whole lot more interesting if you could could use them to explore environments, or to go fishing together or maybe go beat up Tom Nook and rob his store. Animal Crossing is just an example. Imagine a socially-oriented visual game in a similar vein that uses your MySpace or FaceBook contacts. It seems like a winning combination to me.

So, do you happen to have a large bag of money laying around? I could make you that game… ¬¬

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Game Industry, Web games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.