Inside Social Games

Rendering three dimensions in a social game is a tall order, and My City attempts to leap this skyscraper with a single bound. They don’t exactly nail the landing, but it’s fun to watch them try.

My City allows you to create your own virtual city, starting with a small cottage to a sprawling metropolis consisting of thousands. You add citizens, and their dwellings, by either adding one per day manually or inviting friends to become citizens.

Unfortunately, the major drawback of the game is how social it demands you be. Without your friends accepting invitations and becoming citizens, your city will grow as if it were on an ancient burial ground and had signs that said “Live here- free toxic waste.” You can only add one citizen to your own city per day, or you can add two to others’ cities (I was finding myself less than selfless after no one helped me out). You can choose what kind of citizen you add, and this will improve your stats (science, entertainment, etc). This strategic element is a great concept, and wedded with the 3D renditions of the city, makes for a great start to a game.

But the slow pace of the game for non-friend-finders and the lack of consequences for your actions makes the game seem shallow. If you keep adding accountants to your city, shouldn’t you be asked to confront problems? Text prompts or crises would create more interesting game play. Choosing where your citizens build and perhaps adding other “Sim City”-esque features could greatly enhance the experience.

Right now, aside from viewing your friends’ cities, viewing leaderboards, and trying to turn your friends into citizens, there isn’t much to do in My City. My City can get boring in a New York minute.

Game play: 2

Development: 4

Potential: 9

See, I’m from Jersey, see. In Jersey, we don’t got no mafia, see. We just have something called “waste management.” Now who asked choo?

Mob Wars is a funny little social game that lets you build up your goon from garden variety thug to Godfather. Like many social RPGs, Mob Wars is mainly a text-based game that allows you to buy guns, do jobs, buy land, fight, heal, level up, bank, and do favors for the Godfather himself. It’s still in beta testing with some of the features, but on the whole it’s a pretty balanced game that has enough variety in its earning structure to allow players an open leveling experience and depth if they want it.

You need to keep track of health, energy, stamina, weapons, money, and experience – which is a lot – but this ensures the game has plenty of checks and balances. You can’t win overnight. It’s also a lot less grind-heavy than a lot of its competitors [cough] Armies, which have such large price tags on the biggest weapons that you’ll likely never get there.

The main drawbacks with a game like this come from its very status as a social game. You need to increase the size of your mob in order to fight other mobs or do bigger jobs, but if your friends don’t accept, you’ll have to hire guns through the Godfather. This bottleneck is a glaring balance issue that needs to be resolved, but it’s a far smaller complaint than what I usually have for these games. Yes, I would like the ability to customize my appearance, see some flash animations of the fights, and perhaps see a visual representation of rivalries and gang wars. These are suggestions of where to take the game, however, and not a requirement for its success.

Mob Wars is a better experience than most text RPGs, and has a quick economy and a relatively balanced game play setup to boot. It needs to break from the crowd, however, in order to truly differentiate itself and earn the respect of this Jersey boy. Kapeesh?

Gameplay: 6

Developers: 7

Needs more mob movie references: 10

The Oregon Trail remains, with the likes of baseball cards and freeze tag, a symbol of my youth. I’m not alone in these warm feelings of nostalgia for the iconic pioneering adventure game that put you at the reins of a party of foolhardy travelers trying to make it to Oregon. You were told that they would then enjoy a new life in the west, but in all likelihood probably founded a basketball program that would routinely make the worst draft choices in the history of the NBA. Developed by Kickflip, The Oregon Trail is a decently faithful adaptation of the original game, but with some noteworthy alterations for the Facebook Platform.

For starters, you can only unlock new jobs upon beating the game. Initially, you are given a job that you had back east (banker, teacher, Kathy Griffin’s personal assistant, etc.) that determined how much money you had and other bonuses. Some devotees of the series may be miffed at being forced into a set job, but those who play a lot of casual games are used to having to play a lot in order to unlock features.

Your party this time around consists of a mix of friends you’ve invited and friends who have the application. Don’t worry, if they die in game, you can still use them next game and they don’t die in real life. It’s fun to be informed of your friends having some archaic disease, especially if you like to play god and decide to not rest and push the pace to grueling. Their fates are in your hands and you can be as cruel a party leader or as lazy as you’d like.

One major change between the old game and the new is the hunting aspect. If your party is getting filling portions and there is a lot of them, you’ll burn through food quicker than John Daly at the 19th hole. This means you’ll get used to hunting like every three days. While this gets old fast, you have two options. You can play a guessing game (which costs a bullet) and pick one of nine cards to shoot at (some of them have animals behind them, some of them have scenery). It’s like Russian roulette, only with deer.

For the more adventurous, you can go to a shooting range Flash game where you can aim at images of deer and pheasants that fly across the screen. They move very quickly, but if you learn their patterns it’s really easy to come back with 300 pounds of meat every time. Again, the animation is cheap and it seems easier to program than the original game’s shooting system. That said, it fits in with the game overall just fine and if there wasn’t an economy issue that made you have to hunt so much, no one would be complaining.

There is a saloon and a traveler’s chat option to keep the game social, and there are plenty of other little mini-games tacked on to play to pass the time. It’s a slower-paced game than most casual games, and has a lot of built in depth. The developers do a solid job of making it more social by allowing you to talk to your party, talk to other players, and see a leader board. Plus, it’s a lot of fun to have your friends’ icons in your party as you travel. The ability to choose which friends join you and add in random names would be nice (especially if you want a smaller party with fewer mouths to feed), but perhaps I’m looking for something to find fault with, a buffalo chip among the barbeque, if you will.

It’s a solid adaptation of a classic game. The developers could incorporate some more features to promote synchronous game play and a better hunting feature, but other than that, I can’t complain much, I reckon.

Gameplay: 8.5

Developers: 8

Nostalgia: 10

As the social gaming space grows, Inside Social Games will be keeping track of the top Facebook games. Here’s a first look at the top 20 social games on Facebook as of today, June 24, 2008:

Some interesting observations:

• This list only measures DAU, not engagement or monetization, of course.
• 5 of the top 10 and 21 of the top 50 Facebook apps are games.
• Social network MyYearbook has the most popular game on Facebook, Owned. It is a copy cat of Serious Business‘s Friends For Sale, which is only slightly behind at #2.
• Playfish is a rising star with 3 out of the top 10 games. Their engagement rate as a company is also at 13%, the highest of any large app developer on Facebook.
• Zynga has 4 apps on this list, and is the 3rd largest Facebook developer overall in terms of DAU, behind Slide and RockYou.
• Even though Nicknames, the largest app in terms of DAU by social game developer SGN, doesn’t make it into this list, SGN is the 7th largest Facebook developer overall in terms of DAU.

Playfish is one of the most exciting companies you haven’t heard of. Founded just last year, the company has already opened studios in Europe, Asia, and (soon) North America, and is the developer of 3 of the top 10 games on Facebook today.

We spent some time with Kristian Segerstråle, CEO of Playfish, to learn more about his vision for the company, the emerging “social gaming” space, and how social networks compare to other gaming platforms.

Kristian, thanks for sitting down with us today. So how did Playfish get started?

Playfish was founded in October of last year. We are a team of games entrepreneurs – we came from Glu Mobile, and were a part of building up that industry. When we saw the Facebook Platform, we thought to ourselves, “Aha, this might be the next big thing in video games.” For the first time, Facebook gave video game developers access to your real world friends. You have to be a much more hardcore player to play online games with strangers, so we thought this was a big opportunity.

So we raised $4 million in seed financing and started running. We have a studio structure – our London studio launched Who Has the Biggest Brain? just before Christmas.  Then they started on Word Challenge. Our Norwegian studio started working on Bowling Buddies. The first title from our Beijing studio should be coming out in the next couple months, with more from London and Norwegian studios as well.

Obbiously it’s still a very early market, but there’s already a lot of games out there. This is the first time in the recent history of the video game industry that we’re not waiting for hardware. It’s usually a slow ramp up because you’re waiting for hardware to get sold. Facebook turned on a platform that reaches 70 million people, so it’s not surprising how quickly the industry has developed.

What lessons have you learned so far?

Designing social games is totally different than designing video games for other platforms. On the surface they look quite similar, but actually you have to think about them quite differently. When you design a game on a standalone platform, you try to draw players in quickly and keep them motivated over time. You do things like visual and audio rewards and achievements, and give ways for people who are into it to keep going. But when you design for social platforms, you do those things in the beginning because you want to get players started in the game, but then you want to get the users to take a step out of the game and use it as a way to communicate with friends.

In addition, the sheer amount of user feedback you get allows you to, in a sense, outsource a part of your design. You have the luxury to update your game, you can listen to your users and give them what they want. It creates a great emotional relationship between a publisher and a player.

How do you see risks in developing for the Facebook platform?

If you compare the rules of publishing on Facebook to the rules of publishing on any other platform (like cell phones), you’re talking about orders of magnitudes of difference. On mobile platforms, you have to get approved, certified, sometimes there are age ratings, and typically you even pay a share of your income to the platform holder. Compared to that kind of environment, Facebook is an amazing place to publish games. It’s a great thing to see them take their role of managing the platform seriously. The more consumers want to hang out on social networks the better it is for us in the long run… if social networks don’t moderate the environment, consumers will.

Are you spending time on other platforms?

We started with Facebook because it is the most mature platform out there. We think of ourselves as creating games wherever people hang out, whether that be Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Orkut, or wherever.

What do you see as the areas of true innovation in social games?

We have been awed by the innovation that has taken place on the Facebook Platform so far. For example, games like Friends For Sale or apps like Bumper Stickers that have game like elements. Even in the 30 year old video game industry, the number of truly original ideas that come out is relatively small. Social games allow you to evoke different kinds of player behavior, but having said that, some of the mechanics are a bit like the multi-user dungeons invented in the 90s that evolved into WOW.  We aren’t waiting for the hardware like the MUDs were, but we think those mechanics are here to stay. I think we’ll see production values quickly rising.

Who else do you see playing in this space?

If you think about game creation focus on the Y axis, and social focus of companies on the X axis, folks like EA Sports fit in top left, while widget companies like RockYou and Slide fit in the bottom right – their games are considerably lighter than Madden 08 but incredibly viral and social. We think there are few plays in the top right corner. We think we’re there, and SGN and Zynga are there (though some of their apps are more communcation tools). We have seen some experiments from game companies like Smarty Pants from EA.

The challenge of social networks for traditional game developers are several:

• You’ve got to write games in Flash, which is not the best language if you’re used to serious game platforms.
• You can’t just take an existing game and port it onto Facebook – you run into that design problem where if you design a deep single player experience you’re not making it more fun to play together. If it’s not more fun to play together than by yourself, you’ll never invite anyone.
• The business model is against you. if you’re selling a box that people are willing to pay $60 for, then you probably should not be giving that away for free on Facebook.
• And finally, the internal game development process is different. Depending on the size of the title, it can take six months to a couple years of prototyping, design, development, crunch time, and launch, and then it’s the marketing team’s problem and you move on. Maybe if it’s good you do a sequel at some point. For social games, it’s completely different. Once you’ve launched, you have to improve the product and optimize it over time, because if you don’t, you’re not likely to succeed. Most game companies are not set up to develop product like that; they’ve got to set up entirely different departments. EA has puclicly stated that they’re setting up departments to do this, and we think others are as well. We welcome that, but we do think that it’s quire different.

What is your business model?

We’re looking to build a transactional business. It will always be some combination of advertising and transactions. We’ve focused on building audience so far, and you’ll see more transactional stuff coming from us in the next couple of months. Transactions have been well proven as a source of revenue across the casual games industry and MMO space, but no one’s got a great example of how it works on social networks yet. Maybe it’s in feature unlocks, which are popular in casual games industry, or the virtual goods driven model in MMOs to look cooler or express yourself.

Do you think the recent Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect initiaves will gain traction, and if so, how do you think they’re relevant to social games?

It’s certainly a great idea to allow games on other platforms to access your Facebook friends. What they don’t let you do is share as easily, so it will be a slightly different type of game and service that will use Facebook Connect and Friend Connect. Using it on the iphone would be a compelling idea. I am still a believer that mobile is a mass market entertainment platform of the future, but the business models aren’t quite there yet. Doing transactions and advertising is a very exciting prospect, but we’re not quite there yet.

Thanks Kristian. Do you have any final thoughts?

Something that struck me recently – if you look at any top 10 game charts for any platform, they are dominated 80% by sequels or IP that’s licensed from somebody else. For example, Halo 3 or Transformers or Super Mario or the Matrix. And the reason for that is that retail games is a shelf life environment. As I was going through the top 20 or 30 social games on FB i couldn’t find a single sequel or a matrix, and I think this is really exciting because it means we just might be able to free ourselves (as the games industry) from having to license IP or be stuck doing sequels. How that will pan out over time we will see, it could just be a reflection of where we are as an industry.

Playfish is really just trying to create great games at the moment and learn as much as we can. We’ve released 3 titles so far, and we’re busy building bigger more ambitious products. We’ll see how far this will go – we think it’s got awesome potential. The video game industry is $40-50 billion, which is bigger than music or movies, and we think that social gaming has the potential to grab a reasonable portion of that and become a billion dollar industry because it’s such a new emotional experience to play with your friends.

Pokey!, despite its ambiguous name, is one of the big pet-themed games on Facebook. Developers should pay particular attention to Pokey! (created by Bonehead Labs) because they do a great deal right.

On the game play side, you get to adopt an adorable puppy, name it, feed it, water it, and play with it. Simple flash animations render your puppy adorably true-to-life. Depending on your feelings on puppies, that’s a good thing.

Your heart will melt when your puppy dutifully brings back the frisbee you toss it or grins when you pet it. But if you neglect your puppy for a period of time, the social elements of the game kick in. There are many ways to earn “bones” the currency of the game, and one of the most ingenious ways is to pet other people’s dogs (don’t worry, they won’t bite) and feed other hungry dogs. You get rewarded for your kindness with bones, and this helps makes the game more community based. It’s like having your neighbors puppy-sit while you’re gone.

You can also earn bones through partnerships and invites. These bones can be used to purchase dog food for your own dog so it doesn’t starve. Though I doubt the dogs will die if neglected (I’ve tried, no luck), your score on the game will depend on how responsive, loving, and selfless you are as an owner.

The game is still growing, however. The instructions, interface, and animation are all in place to create a solid start, but the app needs more ways to interact with your dog, and more breeds (there are less than ten now). Social gamers will enjoy it for how it creates contexts for fun interactions with your friends. It still needs to add some social elements between dogs (like say dog shows or play pens), but the outline is there to make a dog-gone great app. Hooray for dog puns.

Gameplay: 7

Development: 7

Adorable-level: 9

Inside Social Games extends a huge thank you two our two sponsors: charter sponsor SGN (Social Gaming Network) and new sponsor Zynga.

Both SGN and Zynga are pioneering the social gaming industry, producing cutting edge games and building distribution channels for the broader ecosystem of social game developers. If you haven’t checked out the latest on what SGN and Zynga are up to, do so today, and stay tuned to Inside Social Games!

Social Gaming Network (SGN) is a leading global development platform for social game distribution.

Zynga Game Network is a leading developer and distributor of social games for platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

As social game designers combine elements of social networking application design and more “traditional” virtual world/MMO game design in new ways, we’re bound to see new twists on traditional models of product design emerge.

Andrew Chen wrote tonight on the intersection of the intersection of the “Bartle types” approach to game design and “Web 2.0 participation pyramid” approach to web app design. After explaining the background on each approach, Andrew concludes,

In general, I think the two views are in conflict with each other due to the emphasis on user-generated content versus company-created content. In a pure UGC web 2.0 site, you need the content creators otherwise there’s nothing to do for anyone else. Take a site like Digg or Facebook, and if it’s just you on the site, it’s not so interesting. Compare this perspective to the games world, which has long built gradual “solo” experiences that then open into social experiences.

I agree with Andrew that in either case, the challenge is to create a compelling/fun initial experience. It’s harder to get a UGC ball rolling in my experience, since the experience is largely dependent on the relatively concurrent presence of others.

I decided to play Ping Pong with about two seconds thought, and the game was worth that amount of time. No more, no less. The game is exactly what it promises, a digital game of ping pong. It’s not to be confused with the classic “pong,” because that was a 2D game. This is a 3D flash game that takes into account angles, speed, and depth of the shot.

You play against a CPU, and this is perhaps the best indication of how much work this game still needs. The CPU is good. Really good. For only being a floating paddle, it handles like a champion of the poltergeist world. The challenging element keeps you coming back, but it’s still a pretty tedious experience.

The developers have created a forum, high scores, videos, and an invitation tab. The photos and videos don’t relate to this game specifically, but instead to the greater idea of “ping pong.” It’s pretty amateurish but you can imagine that there are people who are really enjoying the making/playing of this app. The game would be greatly improved by the ability to challenge your friends and unlock new features. As it stands, this game is worth perhaps two minutes of game play, and after that you move on to other applications.

Gameplay: 4

Developers: 4

Playfish, makers of Who Has the Biggest Brain, has another hit Facebook game in Word Challenge. For those of you who were hooked on phonics as a kid, love the game Boggle, or consider yourselves a human Thesaurus – this is an app for you.

Word Challenge, with its adorable interface and Flash graphics, presents a simple challenge: with the scrambled letters, you have to make the most words possible before time runs out. You get more time for every four or five letter word you find. The game is a challenging vocab game adapted beautifully to the social networking platform.

After you are given your score and a title (things like Hermit, Mime, School Bully, etc), you can see your friends’ scores. You can try to beat these scores or you can challenge a friend directly. This may not seem like a great deal of game play depth, and that’s fair, but this game doesn’t really need much. A national list of high scores, weekly updates on high scores, and your friends’ scores is enough to keep you playing to climb the ladder.

I’m awful at this game, but I’ve been playing this game about four times more than I normally do because I hate losing to my friends. Users’ competitive natures will keep them coming back time and time again. Playfish, to their credit, also creates a very friendly interface with a little animated host who tells you adorably insulting things when you stink it up royally. Apparently the brainy little host thinks I have the vocabulary of a school yard bully. Yeah, well, she’s… uh, stupid.

Gameplay: 8

Developers: 8

Words in my vocab: -25