Ok – so, “Social Gaming”, obviously, is the “New Hotness” – or rather, was the “New Hotness” about a year ago, and has spent the last half year percolating into the wider consciousness. And it drives me absolutely batshit crazy.
Why is it called “Social Gaming”?
Yes, the initial thing that differentiated games was their presence on various social networks, and the ability to use things like Facebook’s friend features to involve your friends at some superficial level maybe at some point wasn’t just a pure Spam Engine, but now?
Now the only differentiating factor between “Social Games” and your run of the mill lousy Flash game is that the “Social Games” require you to mount a full on assault on your friends to do anything of note. Or spend a bunch of money, which removes even the cursory “socialization” from the games.
I guess the thing that really bothers me isn’t even what they are – I mean, a game really just is what it is, and complaining about what it isn’t just means you want something else. But the point is that I want something else. I want a game that fulfills the promise of “social gaming” but isn’t what “social gaming” has come to mean.
So, I poked Self Aware’s twitter account & asked what other people thought. Their responses included things like:
- Teamwork
- Rivalry
- Mastery of a skill
- Chat
- Simplicity
- Addictiveness
- Safety
- Asychronicity, when possible
So, the question of asychronicity is an interesting one. Clearly, a game like Words With Friends uses that incredibly well – you can let moves queue up, and then address them at your leisure, which means you almost always have something to do in a free moment, but you’re also not pressured to do something right now.
But at the same time, the asychronicity means that there’s really not much of a distinction between playing with someone I know and an AI that behaves like them. In some cases, that’s enough to feel like I’m interacting with my friends, but other times, not at all. At the same time, with most asynchronous games, if you’re taking your turns fast enough, it basically becomes a real-time experience.
But so, again – what’s a “social” game? Teamwork, rivalry, and chat are obvious ways to interact with others. But there’s the simplicity & addictiveness – are these parts of a good social game? Addictiveness, well – that’s almost a reflexive way to describe something compelling. Simplicity/Accessibility is critical as well, since the more simple/accessible, the more people can play – mastery isn’t a requirement to participate.
At the same time, you should have some measure of mastery. Simplicity’s great to start, but without a sense of mastery, you lose a sense of progression. And mastery isn’t always, “execute a command perfectly or die” – there are many axes of mastery – strategy, efficiency, dexterity… Heck, in a social game, having friends who will help you is a sort of mastery, I’d say.
One thing that no one mentioned was “spam your friends to progress.” Yet it’s clearly effective at creating awareness about the game. Developers wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t effective, and I think that in order to build an audience of the scale necessary to maintain these sorts of games, encouraging people to spread the word is a critical function. But geez – there’s a balance to be had.
In a single session of Frontierville, I’d be surprised if there were less than a request every thirty seconds for me to spam my friends in some manner. That’s ten separate requests (often interruptions) for about five minutes worth of game time. And the game itself? It really starts to feel like the “reward” for accomplishing *anything* in game is a request to spam your friends.
Now, maybe complaining about this sort of thing is going to bite me in the foot later. Maybe it’s all necessary for creating a sustainable, profitable “social game”. But I’m sick of it. I want a social game that’s about socialization. That’s about interaction with others, synchronous AND not. That’s about cooperation, competition, exploration, mastery, and simplicity that grows into complexity and depth. I want an experience that’s social. I want something that’s fun, as a game – but also more. I want something that fulfills the promise of the new wave of awareness and connectivity, instead of something that uses it as a bludgeon.
Now, obviously, this isn’t just idle speculation. Will we be able to strike that balance?
I guess we’ll find out.
re: “Social Games hating socialization” – one point I wanted to make was simply that it’s not just that “social games” aren’t social – it’s that they’re actively interfering in *real* socialization. I have friends on Facebook I’ve blocked because I can’t deal with forty or fifty alerts *a day* from the “games” they’re playing. And these are people I’d very much like to keep in touch with – but when you get 50 spam things per useful update, the ratio’s just way out of whack.
Of course, the other thing that drives me bonkers is, frankly, that I think of Word Ace & Card Ace as social games – they’re games that people play while socializing. We put a lot of work into trying to make the social aspect of it feel valuable – and so every time I hear the general label “social games” knowing that what they’re *really* talking about are “viral” games that blast your contacts with spam, it makes me a little crazy.
There are games that do this brilliantly – Qrank, for instance, is a fantastic game that uses the current crop of social networks to promote some fantastic asynchronous competition – but makes the fact that you’re competing against *other people* the foremost mechanic. Words With Friends is excellent. Highborn takes that asynchronous mechanic & applies to to a strategy game. There are a lot of games that are striking a nice balance of social & game – and it’s appalling that the games that are barely games, and are barely social have hijacked the label.
Great read! I believe the board games that we grew up with are social games; the idea is not new. The technology has definitely changed, but the concepts of design, marketing and sales remains. Just look at all the flavors of Trivial Pursuit; look at all the offsprings of charades/Pictionary.
I’d be interested on your thoughts on FourSquare.
Whether it be getting the most points or unlocking badges, competition can exist. Most the women I’ve been around that use it really like the social aspect of it: seeing where their friends are eating so they ask them about the experience later, and helping their friends unlock badges.
Does FourSquare fall into the realm of gaming? Social gaming?
re: FourSquare – yeah, I’d consider it a social game – but it’s just about the lightest-weight version of a social game I can imagine. And because of that, I ended up getting bored really quickly. That is, as a game, in and of itself, it was mindboggling boring. As a social tool, though, it kept me up to date with my friends’ activities in a new and interesting way.
I mean, in some sense, Foursquare’s interesting new thing was the concept of checking in. It’s a mechanic. The game they applied it to was incredibly uninteresting. But if you’d applied the checking-in mechanic to something more compelling, or even paired it up with a more interesting service (like Yelp), then you’ve got something altogether different.