Why is creating and managing virtual worlds so appealing? In short, it is a combination of control, expression, and creativity. In bigger worlds like SimCity or Roller Coaster Tycoon, players control an entire world and aren’t limited to simpler spaces or systems. And now, Zynga is bringing the businessperson inside us all to the Facebook platform with its latest release, Roller Coaster Kingdom.

Roller Coaster Kingdom is somewhat reminiscent of a simplified version of the Roller Coaster Tycoon series. At the beginning, players can build a handful of attractions with the coin they start out with. As players build up their attractions, guests start to file in for a good time. For each ride guests visit, a bit of money is earned and thus the business begins to take flight.

For now, the term business is used in a limited sense, because there doesn’t seem to be a  lot of strategy involved in earning income. It feels like Zynga has spent more time so far on aesthetics than creating a wider breadth of game play. That isn’t to say there isn’t any strategy at all though. Players can still upgrade attractions, build new elements based on NPC “thoughts,” and replace outdated rides. On that same token, however, there is no noticeable marketing or manual price setting.

While the traditional  concept of “salary” doesn’t exist, you do pay  your workers in food. Each attraction or vendor requires someone to manage it, and they can only work for about three hours before needing “payment.” What is most interesting, however, is that these workers are your friends. As a social game, this is perhaps the most curious feature of the game, as you get to place them at any ride you want and watch them earn their keep in some rather goofy outfits.

While it is simple  compared to its breathren, the game is fairly fun. Like most social games of this genre, it is a bit slow in getting started, but once you start to get a decent cash flow, the ability to create what you want becomes much more entertaining. The game does have some kinks to it, but as with most Zynga games, it is unlikely to remain the same for too long. Changes will happen, improvements will be made, and all in all, we’re sure to see more improvements soon.

As surprising as it might be, many game portals have actually been somewhat slow in integrating social capabilities. However, Candystand.com is not one of them – the popular portal recently integrated Facebook Connect in an effort to give the website a bit more of a social network feel.

Currently, the games site sees about 10 million visits (5 million uniques) each month with approximately 13.8 minutes per visit. Of course, the problem is that these have traditionally been more or less solo-based games, and while those numbers are not bad at all, parent company Funtank believes there is potential for much more.

Scott Tannen, President of Funtank, says that above everything else, the amount of time players spend on Candystand should see the greatest increase. By making the games more social, visitors will be able to invite friends, set up challenges, add their avatar to their Facebook profile, and compete against others via features such as high scores and leaderboard systems.

Curiously enough, Tannen has said that the company did actually consider building a social network of their own, but scrapped the idea. With 250 million people on Facebook, and roughly 70% of Candystand’s current user base having a Facebook account already, it only seemed logical to integrate with Facebook Connect. Ironically, Candystand games are only available through the portal itself and not Facebook. According to Funtank, this is to avoid any significant dependency on an external site.

Despite this reasoning, however, Funtank is looking to publish its games on other platforms such as the iPhone and PlayStation Portable. Unfortunately, the details of when and how have not yet been revealed.

Not long ago, San Francisco startup Heyzap released a casual game widget platform that allowed website owners to easily incorporate casual Flash games. The idea was to assist in game distribution and generate revenue through in-game advertisements and virtual goods. Now, Heyzap is adding a new payout system that will offer publishers the opportunity to receive 15% of all proceeds generated.

The Heyzap platform is currently used by around 35,000 publishers with the original goal being to increase engagement levels. Once games have been embedded, revenue can be tracked via a dashboard on the Heyzap homepage. After the 15% cut to publishers, the remaining revenue is split between the game’s developer and Heyzap themselves.

Since the release, Heyzap co-founder, Immad Akhund, has sayd that 15 developers have integrated the Heyzap payments system so far. Akund expects to see that number grow quickly since many developers are currently working on games that are meant for microtransactions specifically.

With the large number of casual Flash games on the market, platforms like Heyzap are starting to help with monetization. So far, Heyzap has been growing quite nicely, and this new service ought to further growth significantly.

Part pinball, part pool, part quirky, cartoon entertainment, social game Bumper Stars has players collecting hoards of food in a most peculiar way. In the game, created by PressOK Entertainment and Large Animal Games, players control a rather rotund animal and knock it about a pinball table to collect scattered fruits in a limited number of attempts.

In the game, players are granted three tries to collect everything on the board, simply clicking and dragging the animal to determine direction and force, and it proceeds to bounce of walls and pinball bumpers in the hopes of tagging that floating food products. As difficult as it might sound, at first, the game is actually quite fun once you get used to it.

To that end, this simple Facebook game is also now available on the iPhone. Through the use of Facebook Connect, fans of the Bumper Stars game will now be able to play Bumber Stars Mobile anywhere they want for about $1.

All of the game’s familiar mechanics are still present, and players can log in using their existing Facebook accounts. In fact, the asynchronous game play allows players to invite and challenge friends regardless whether they are using the mobile device or the Facebook platform itself. In addition, the new mobile version attempts to fight off stagnation by adding in the ability to earn points by playing, creating, winning challenges, and inviting new friends. Through the points, new content such as backgrounds, bumpers, and even characters are available for purchase.

Currently, Bumper Stars Mobile is among only a few other games that have interwoven their web and mobile titles, but while it may be one of the first, it is hardly the last. Bumper Stars is also slated to be released for the Blackberry, Android, J2ME, and BREW by the end of Q3 this year.

Social game developer socialDeck that was one of the first to create an iPhone game that could play with Facebook users. This was almost a year ago, and now, roughly 11 months later, the company is releasing the game Shake & Spell for the BlackBerry, claiming it is the first game to run across iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry that lets players compete against one another in real time.

In short, the game is a simple word game in which players “shake” (literally) up a bunch of letters in order to scramble them and try and spell out as many words as possible. Each day players are presented with daily challenges to complete in solo play, but the real draw is the more social leaderboard and head to head competition. The game’s Facebook and iPhone counterparts (launched last fall) have garnered over 500,000 users.

With the new BlackBerry launch, these existing players can now seamlessly interact with Blackberry players, furthering socialDeck’s notion of “anywhere, anytime, anyone” gaming.

“Shake & Spell was developed on the socialDeck social gaming platform, which lets people connect, communicate, and interact with friends across multiple mobile devices and social networks,” said Anish Acharya, socialDeck co-founder and CEO. “We’re now even closer to a truly ubiquitous and social gaming experience where it’s not about how or where the game is played, but rather with whom.”

In addition to the cross-platform capabilities, the developers also announced new viral discovery and distribution features available via the socialDeck platform through which the game was created. Currently, Shake & Spell can be shared through multiple user feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, SMS, and even email.

“The top-ranked applications featured in mobile app stores continue to get the lion’s share of downloads,” said Acharya. “The ability to cross-pollinate Shake & Spell between devices and social networking platforms means that the game can now reach new and potentially untapped audiences by driving its discovery regardless of the game’s ranking within a mobile app store.”

A full demo of the cross-platform game play can be found here.

It’s no surprise noe to see more mainstream console developers moving in more social directions, but the number of international developers integrating with Facebook seems to only be growing by the week.

Tokyo based game developer Konami (maker of hit titles such as Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill) is the latest to join in on the social gaming trend, but rather than just bring a game to the social space, they have, in a way, brought the social space to them.

Konami, earlier this month, released a brand new casual and social games portal by the name of Konami Play. Unlike other gaming portals, however, this particular web site brings more than just Flash games to the table, but also takes a trip down memory lane with web enabled renditions of classic Konami titles.

Of the games currently available, players can play games that range from old titles such as Double Dribble and Track & Field to Flash only games such as Bumper Stars or Loco Roco 2. In addition, visitors are also able to play some web versions of Konami’s more current, not to mention successful, games as well, such as Metal Gear Solid 4, inFAMOUS, and Dance Dance Revolution (“dancing” is done with the arrow keys for anyone raising an eyebrow, and it is surprisingly addictive).

Suffice to say, most of the games are quite fun (though a rating system would be helpful for the lesser known games), be it through nostalgia or simply presentation, but what takes them beyond being “just fun” is the Facebook integration. Konami Play allows players to register on the site, yes, but anyone with a Facebook account can also authenticate through Facebook Connect.

Every game on the portal is Facebook enabled and comes with all the social network’s highlights. Regardless of where the games are played, players are able to compete with and challenge other users, view leaderboards, embed widgets, participate in contests, and post game achievements to their feeds.

Certainly, this is a big step into the social realm for the Japanese company. The fact that a console developer from another country decided to make use of Facebook in such a significant way is what is impressive, but Konami is unlikely to be the last. Overall, the games on Konami Play are quite fun to play, and given the company’s track record, more are undoubtedly on the way.

While farming has been popular in China for a while, farming on Facebook really first started growing with a simple social game called myFarm. Then came Farm Town, which hit an impressive rank of #4 in the Top 25 within its first month, and later, Zynga took a crack with FarmVille and ousted long time veterans for the overall #1 spot on the Facebook gaming charts. Next came Playfish with Country Story, and so it’s only a matter of time before yet another major social game developer joined the fray.

Now, Green Patch is going farming with its latest title (Lil) Farm Life.

Like all (Lil) games from Green Patch, Farm Life utilizes similar key concepts of its predecessors: players plow land, plant seeds, tend to them, harvest them when they grow, and send gifts to friends. In Green Patch fashion, gift proceeds go to the prevention of rain forest deforestation.

However, with this game, players don’t have to deal with the care of plants (i.e. daily watering) as much. Instead, Farm Life incorporates the all too familiar mechanic from other games in which players and friends can help each other out by cleaning up leaves, scaring off crows, harvesting crops and so on. In fact, the more you help friends, the more money you earn for your hard work.

Certainly, this is the best looking game from Green Patch. All of the visuals are crisp and clean and don’t have that flat pixelated look that has been seen before. A number of the elements are animated and the game comes complete with a quirky instrumental rendition of the children’s song “Old McDonald” (though this will probably be muted shortly). Perhaps the best element, however, is the custom avatars, which are significantly better than the other farm titles out there in terms of customization.

(Lil) Farm Life is another farming game, so there’s not much new to say about game play that hasn’t been said before in the previously mentioned games. However, what is most frustrating is the uncanny level of bugs that one encounters while playing at the moment. For example, upon first creating a character, the “Return Home” command required that the avatar needed a change to female and the game started reading the player farm as a friend‘s farm. Using the context menu to plant seeds on multiple plots of land caused one plot to become unusable with a “can’t do this action right now” type of error. These bugs were not too frequent though and seemed to go away after a reload of the game.

Looking past the bugginess, (Lil) Farm Life is not a bad game. It’s not wholly original, but frankly, it stands out amongst the other Green Patch titles due to visual style.

This is a guest post by Andrew Chen. It originally appeared on his blog here.

And now you learn how I spent my childhood…

Some of the fondest memories from my childhood are playing BBS door games. Back before the web existed, I was a 10 year old kid in Seattle dialing into 3 or 4 different  different BBSes using a pirated version of Procomm Plus. There, I found that you could download all sorts of awesome products (though in 20 different parts, which you had to put back together), and more importantly, they had the ability to launch “door games” like Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite, and a number of other games I grew to love. I spent so many hours tying up the phone line after getting back from school that eventually my parents banned me from playing these games – but that only convinced me to set an alarm for 3am to wake up in the middle of the night to play!

Furthermore, it became a critical thing in my life to get all my friends from school to also play these games with me. Together, we’d team up into a powerful, coordinated unit, and dominate the other players on the BBS and regional network. (Or at least that was the plan) Eventually years passed, I learned the internet was more than gopher, and I moved on to better and more powerful massively multiplayer games.

It’s obvious, in retrospect, that a lot of the door games that existed 20 years ago pioneered a lot of the same techniques that social games use today. Let’s drill into a bunch of these similarities, covering the following topics:

• Door games are the “apps” to the BBS platform
• Social gameplay with friends and neighbors
• Turn-based, RPG-like gameplay
• Low-tech graphical experiences, delivered as a persistent social experience

If I’m missing anything, please leave a comment! Anyway, let’s get started…

Door games are the “apps” to the BBS platform

First, let me describe what a BBS actually is – you can read a more official version on Wikipedia here. Anyone with a phone line, modem, and computer running the right software could start up a BBS. The software would tell the computer, when it received a call, to automatically pick up the line and start talking to the computer on the other end. On the other side, anyone could dial into the BBS with the right terminal software and once the connection was established, you’d get a screen that looked something like this:

On these BBSes, you’d typically find a couple different sections:

• Private communication (reading and writing messages)
• Public communication (message boards)
• File sharing (downloading and uploading)
• External applications, including Door games

The external applications were integrated with the BBS as described by Wikipedia:

The BBS software starts the external program, and the door system passes data back and forth between the door program, the BBS, and the remote user. To supply the door program with the user’s information (such as the user’s alias and the amount of time they had spent online), the BBS software creates a dropfile containing information for the program to read.

This “dropfile” typically contained all the user information, so rather than the standard API where the app asks for that information, instead it was provided in one big file. The door game would then parse this data and use it for the game. For the extra nerdtastic detail, you can go here for the dropfile specs.

Now of course this process of extending the BBS’s functionality isn’t as flexible as things are now – after all, you couldn’t just upload a new Door game to a BBS and get it running. You also couldn’t update your game and instantly propagate the new version out to all the users. But the central idea is still the same.

Social gameplay with friends and neighbors

One of the interesting properties of BBSes is that because they are all accessed by phone, and you don’t want to pay long-distance bills, you end up dialing into BBSes in your own area code. For me, that was 206, and it means that I was mostly gaming with people in my same regional area. Similarly, I convinced all my friends to also dial into the same BBSes and play games with me. For the games that had leaderboards and user-to-user interaction, it was easy to feel the same fun game-like motivations that make social gaming work today.

As an aside, while doing research for this blog post, I found this funny ASCII based dating site with Myers-Briggs based writing, and a Wall!

You can tell from the number of dudes on the screen above that the world of lonely nerds has not changed much over the last 20 years.

Turn-based, RPG-like gameplay

One of the big design challenges for any BBS game is that you want to encourage social gameplay, yet it can’t be real time. This is because, of course, people can’t be logged in to the same BBS simultaneously unless the BBS had a ton of different phone lines (not likely). As a result, each of the Door games had to support an social, asynchronous play style that allowed people to dial in one after the other and still engage.

The way that was done depended on the game, of course, but usually combined a mix of computer players (aka NPCs) and “slow” real-time action where each loop of action lasted a day. Then on any given day, you are given a number of turns which you can expend. Once you play these turns, then you need to wait until the next day to get more turns. This made it so that for a game like Tradewars 2002, you can log in, do your trading/mining/attacking, and interact with computer-controlled characters. If you encounter another player’s ship, then you can interact with them with the computer taking control of the other player, so when attacking them, they will automatically defend.

Some of these games played very much like RPGs, with levels, currency, monsters, swords, quests, and the usual mechanics. One of the most popular games was called The Legend of the Red Dragon:

Having the combination of social gameplay with the traditional RPG mechanics created a rich world that allowed for months of play time.

Low-tech graphical experiences, delivered as a persistent social experience

You may notice from all of these screenshots that these games are very, very basic. Many of my friends at the time criticized the simplicity of the gameplay, only to be  sucked in for social reasons :) Similar to the current incarnation of social gaming, the emphasis is not on graphics. The primary advantages of a persistent, continually updated world with social gameplay far outweighed the fact that downloadable single player games had much better graphics. Of course I still downloaded and played Wolfenstein and Doom when it first came out, but throughout that time, I stilled played BBS games.

If there’s one thing to be learned from the BBS games and their related cousins, MUDs, is that great social interactions can trump pretty much everything else. Of course the products that can deliver higher production values and great social experiences are even better off.

It was fun to write this article! Such a blast from the past. Hope you share your memories of BBSes in the comments :)

Though already a multi-billion dollar market in Asia, virtual goods are just beginning to grow as a primary game monetization model in the United States. But what’s the market size today?

According to data from a recent report by Piper Jaffray, US virtual goods revenue last year came it at only around $265 million. PJC is calling for a 134% increase in 2009 to $621 million. The report also estimates  that the growth will remain in the double digits until 2013, at which point total virtual goods revenues will be about $2.5 billion.

While the report points out that a majority of virtual goods’ sales came from virtual worlds, the report says more are shifting to social networks. In general, however, we think these numbers are quite low for 2009 and 2010. Numbers we’re hearing are pointing to much stronger figures.

Piper Jaffray expects global revenues to reach more than $2.2 billion this year. However, in April, +8* | Plus Eight Star, an Asian market research firm, estimated that Asia’s virtual goods economy alone might be worth more than $5 billion. Piper Jaffray expects global revenues to surpass $6 billion come 2013.

Advertising, one of the oldest forms of internet monetization, has struggled lately. But that hasn’t stopped Arkadium from trying to find more effective ways to monetize games with ads. Starting a month ago, the company announced product changes to further enhance its solutions for the advergame and casual game markets.

First, it acquired Advergame.com. It also re-released GreatDayGames, a popular gaming portal. Through these new additions, Arkadium hopes to further enhance its gaming community platforms known as Arenas. According to Kenny Rosenblatt, CEO of Arkadium, the company wants to better attract and target the millions of casual players circulating the web by “showing them offers that are behaviorally targeted, relevant, and improve their game play experience.”

The first step to improving the aforementioned experience is an API for its loyalty system, which allows publishers to incentivize and drive traffic to revenue-base activities, such as rating games, writing reviews, and creating profiles. Second are social capabilities such as mailboxes, messaging, and friend activity notifications. Third, it enables avatar creation and touts improved leaderboards. Other minor features include the bookmaking of favorite games and friends. You can also update game pages containing reviews and sharing capabilities.

Currently, Arkadium services more than five million unique users, with more than 120 million page views each month. According to the company, each Arenas session averages around 20 minutes across online sites such as ABC, ESPN, CBS, and Sony. It has demographics ranging from teens to sports fans. If you couple that with these new features that will likely increase the number of impressions seen, Arkadium’s goal of greater advertising monetization is certainly on its way.