Successful Social Games Are All About Status

February 24th, 2009

By Andrew Mayer

It’s a little shocking to see how quickly Social Platform Games seem to be trying to travel up the gameplay ladder to inherit all the problems and pitfalls of the casual and core markets. It’s not that improving depth and quality aren’t important, but it’s also easy to forget that there are some unique qualities that can be provided by games on a social platform that drive success.

Traditional games are primarily focused on the experience of play. It’s the old “gameplay is everything” model, and while that’s still important, the equation has changed a bit. What a social player is most concerned about is status. After all, telling other people about how you’re doing is what Facebook does best, whether it’s what you’re watching, reading, thinking, or playing. In the end your “wall” is a billboard that gives you a chance to let other people know what you’re up to. It wasn’t all that long ago that only Presidents and movie stars got the kind of attention we’re all getting now.

And if you look at the early social platform successes, you can see that while the gameplay isn’t all that compelling your status is clearly something they all have in common. X-Wars games like Mob Wars are constantly telling you where you’re at, what you need, and what’s next. Scrabulous was also a strong a status game. It constantly let players know when it was their turn, and immediately gave them a “lay of the land” when they saw the game board. For users of these applications “where am I at?” can be almost as important as “what’s next?”

With players coming to your games looking for five minutes of fun you need a place for them to start and end that experience, and a strong status screen is always going to be the place to call home.

Andrew Mayer is a Social Gaming and User Experience Consultant with over seventeen years of experience in the games industry.

To dig deeper into the social gaming market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

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One Response to “Successful Social Games Are All About Status”

Tadhg Kelly Says:
February 24th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
It’s pretty reductive to say that social games boil down to just one trait. Another is the ease of discovery and recommendation: perhaps people are playing a lot of them simply because the applications are taking advantage of the network’s structures to promote themselves.

Only a small percentage of social network users really understand the publishing functions and what they mean. I think it unlikely that the networks consist of millions of fameballs all looking to be seen as mafia dons or whatever. It’s the games doing the distribution of these messages automagically, not the users choosing to publish every little thing they do.

Certainly I think there is an element of status to some games and I think it’s a motivator for some players. It reminds me of nothing so much as high score tables in the arcades. There was always a certain brand of dedicated player who wanted to be known as the number-one guy. But that guy is the minority.

As I may have said before in a previous comment, I think it’s very easy to come up with the idea that just because games are on social networks that this automatically confers some power of difference on them. I think that is not true. Social networks open many doors, some useful for promotion, some genuinely different for gameplay. It’s important to understand what they can be.

I’m liking your recent posts by the way Andrew. They’re very good thought pieces. Keep em coming!