Inside Social Games

It seems like only yesterday that we wondered when mainstream game developers would start making the move to social. For a long time, Electronic Arts has been slowly lumbering forward into the social gaming world, but as the company experimented more and more with the space, we’ve begun to see more big names jump into the fray. At E3, announcements from Microsoft and Nintendo unveiled the integration of Facebook Connect into Xbox Live and Nintendo DSI.

Now, French publisher Ubisoft – producer of titles like Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell, and Rainbow Six – has released its first Facebook game, TickTock.

TickTock is original and plays pretty simply. You answer various questions about your friends’ status updates to both arm and disarm an assortment of bombs. In order to build a bomb, players will be asked sets of multiple choice questions about their friends over the span of 60 seconds. The more that are answered correctly, the more powerful the bomb becomes.

Each question equates to a level on the bomb, so if you get nine questions right, that means you get to send a friend a level nine bomb. In order to disarm it, they must answer an equivalent number of questions or it’s kaboom! Failure to disarm earns the sender points to spend on new toys and trashes the victims’ secret room that, obviously, needs to now be repaired. And Ubisoft incorporates a nice touch of style as game progression leads to bigger and better explosives that range from that simple cherry bomb to devastating nukes and air strikes.

Developed by producer Omar Abdelwahed and a team of six in the San Francisco branch of Ubisoft, TickTock is slated to only be the first of many Facebook games. Moreover, Laurent Detoc, head of Ubisoft North America, says that the company will also be putting its Ubifriends game portal on Facebook as well. Not surprising, considering the millions of users playing Facebook games today.

Abdelwahed has certainly seen the value of social gaming. Ubisoft says that it is looking into other social networks for its games as well, but no details yet on who or when.