The United States Congress told the Federal Trade Commission in March to study the level of access that minors in virtual worlds have to explicit content. An FTC commission released the results earlier this week, and they generally shows what you’d expect — minors are able to access some explicit content in some virtual worlds, despite various efforts by virtual world companies to stop them.

Notably, the explicit content was mostly user generated text (chats, entries on message boards, etc).

The study surveyed a “cross-section” of 27 virtual worlds, variously focused on children, teens and adults. It found “at least one instance of either sexually or violently explicit content in 19″ of them. The sites, divided between 14 child-focused virtual worlds and 13 teen and adult virtual worlds, included well-known names like Gaia Online, Habbo, IMVU, Meez, Neopets, Runescape, Vivaty, and Zynga’s YoVille. See the tables from the report, below, including May traffic and demographic stats from comScore — and note that none of these sites are nearly as large as say, Facebook, MySpace, or many of the social games that run on them.

“It is far too easy for children and young teens to access explicit content in some of these virtual worlds,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “The time is ripe for these companies to grow up and implement better practices to protect kids.”

Here’s the list of the recommendations that the report is giving to virtual worlds:

• Ensuring that the age-screening mechanisms virtual world operators employ do not encourage underage registration;
• Implementing or strengthening age-segregation techniques to help ensure that minors and adults interact only with their peers and view only age-appropriate material;
• Re-examining the strength of language filters to ensure that such filters detect and eliminate communications that violate online virtual worlds’ conduct standards;
• Providing greater guidance to community enforcers in online virtual worlds so that they are better equipped to: self-police virtual worlds by reviewing and rating online content; report the presence of potential underage users; and comment on users who otherwise appear to be violating a world’s terms of behavior; and,
• Employing a staff of specially trained moderators whose presence is well known in- world and who are equipped to take swift action against conduct violations.

Ars Technica has a somewhat critical article about the report, highlighting the inherent difficulty in what the FTC recommends. In terms of the access issue, kids can fake being adults and adults can fake being kids. The other, even bigger problem is that most of the problematic content came from kids themselves — not adults and not the virtual worlds.

The report, despite its aggressive take on the issue, recognizes some limitations. “Given important First Amendment considerations, the Commission supports virtual world operators’ self-regulatory efforts to implement these recommendations.” It also says that kids (and their parents) are responsible for learning how to navigate sites and stay safe.

You can download the PDF of the report, here.

Way back in April, German company Scoreloop launched a social gaming platform of the same name, for the booming iPhone/iPod Touch developer platform. Today, roughly eight months later, the company is expanding that service to another rapidly growing, and similar, mobile platform: Android. With this announcement, social developers for the Android platform will not only receive all the perks iPhone developers have seen, but also get access to the white-label platform, Core Social and its Premium Integration Services.

Current features of Android’s Core Social include online high scores, achievements, player challenges, profiles, cross promotions, wall postings, and virtual currency. As with the iPhone rendition of Core Social, all of these can be implemented directly into the game’s interfaces without breaking the game’s brand consistency with something that screams “Core Social Was Here!” Moreover, if anyone needs help in the use of the white-label elements, then Android users will also be welcome to utilize Scoreloop’s free Premium Integration Services.

The biggest part of the announcement is that players using Scoreloop-enabled games will actually be able to play across the two mobile platforms. This means that if one player plays a game on the Android that also exists on the iPhone, they can issue a challenge directly to the Apple user. That person will receive a push notification to play, and both scores will then be posted on a server-based leaderboard viewable by both parties.

Android’s Core Social also keeps true to some of the oldest Scoreloop features, as well, retaining its social analytics, game recommendations, and free server operations. Unfortunately, the one thing that the platform does not have is Facebook and Twitter integration. Not to worry, though. When we spoke to Scoreloop chief executive Marc Gumpinger, he assured us that this is the next feature on the agenda and will be going live in the next couple of weeks.

Android was not only selected because of its growth and similarity to the iPhone, Gumpinger said. The company had been receiving a number of publisher requests for it as well. While he did not tell us specifics, he also said that the Scoreloop technology was intended to be cross-platform capable since day one and that the company is actually working on releasing their services for three other platforms.

Currently, there are all ready a handful of developers signed up for the new Android Core Social, but the only announced one, at this time, is Indiagames with Android renditions of Cricket T20 Super Sixers and Godzilla – Monster Mayhem. However, developers and publishers alike are invited to check out the Scoreloop-made demo, Bug Landing, which is also now available in the AppMarket.

Core Social Android feature details can be found below:

• Online High Scores
• Achievements
• Player Challenges – Players challenge friend or foe on social networks like Facebook, by email, or using Scoreloop’s auto matching system which pairs opponents with like skill
• Profiles – Track a buddy’s standing and brag about Challenge records
• Social Network Integration – Publish scores and achievements to a wall and invite friends to join in on the fun
• Cross Promotions – Discover what friends are playing by intelligent cross-promotions based on their gaming activities
• Virtual Currencies – Reward players with Coins for attaining achievements or completing Challenges and let them use these to unlock or extend game content

A funny thing happened to Facebook’s open platform – game developers took the opportunity and ran with it, even taking over the core of the service for a while. By this fall, parts of the site had become overrun with users trying to get their friends to join them on their farm, help their mafia or help them clean their aquarium. Beyond constant stories about games in users’s news feeds, developers were making ample use of the Notification feature, jamming it full of promotions and notices of new items and features to get users to come back each day.

Facebook fought back with a roadmap of changes to help the core value of the platform, as well as a news feed that, for many users, caused links, status updates and photos with friends and family resurface to the top.

But all this didn’t treat the core issue: Facebook has become the broadest distribution platform ever for games.

• Almost every top application on Facebook is a game (see AppData for more on that)
• Users are joining Facebook in some parts of the world, like Taiwan, mostly to play games
• Users are subtly being coerced to add strangers as friends to advance in games in order to unlock new levels and items, often without going through the cumbersome process of protecting their personal profile information from these strangers

The sooner that Facebook figures out how to carve out a slice of the Facebook experience to support that, the better it will be for Facebook users and game developers.  And that doesn’t mean cracking down on developers.  It means coming up with a way to meet customer demands and still be true to the core principles of Facebook.

So, a modest proposal:

1) Create a new type of “friend” on Facebook – a “game friend”

2) By default, accepting users as a game friend only provides the sharing of information centered around that game both users have joined

a. Game Friends would not have any access to each other’s profile – users would have to specifically opt in to share such profile information

b. When a user shared an item from an application, they would be given the option of communicating only to Game Friends instead of the current default “All”

3) A new API that allows the accepting of gifts from Game Friends without the cumbersome process of individually accepting through the current requests mechanism

Ideally this allows the users more control over their personal information and allows developers to grow an application by a broader base (go add more friends without endangering your privacy) yet also have much more cost-effective communication with users that are actively interested in their product.

In fact, we’ve already seen some games try to create a set of separate identities, like “poker buddies” in Zynga’s Texas HoldEm poker game. Imagine being able to take your gaming buddies across every game without spamming the rest of your friends. Facebook is now prompting users to adjust their privacy settings to share content with Friends of Friends or Everyone, in an effort to expand the social network and help you meet others. So why not leverage games as a way to potentially do the same?

We should also note that Facebook has clearly thought about the special place that games have taken in its developer ecosystem. In its roadmap for forthcoming changes to the home page, the company shows a separate bookmark tab separate from other applications, specifically for games. Sub-menus let you see see your games and your friends games. Once you select the games page, you can also see your recent games as well as all of the games your friends are playing.

The games bookmark feature looks promising, although it doesn’t fully address the game friend problem. The future of our social networks depends on effective filters. The idea of a game friend filter could provide even clearer value to developers, users, and Facebook.

	Name	MAU
1.	FarmVille	71,523,193
2.	Café World	31,940,052
3.	Causes	31,917,896
4.	Social Interview	29,912,434
5.	Happy Aquarium	27,508,093
6.	Mafia Wars	26,857,214
7.	FishVille	25,305,412
8.	Pet Society	21,447,371
9.	Birthday Cards	21,059,336
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	20,018,548
11.	Facebook for iPhone	19,196,532
12.	YoVille	18,977,171
13.	FamilyLink.com (formerly We’re Related)	18,450,010
14.	Farm Town	18,447,733
15.	Restaurant City	16,655,503
16.	Friends Exposed	16,316,089
17.	Roller Coaster Kingdom	15,138,618
18.	MindJolt Games	13,945,850
19.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	11,732,693
20.	Mobile	11,727,134

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.

GameHouse, a casual gaming unit of Real Networks, has today released its classic puzzle title, Collapse, for a wide range of platforms: PC, Mac, BlackBerry, iPhone, Android and Facebook. You’ve probably already played the game at some point in your life — you start with a Tetris-like window, various colored squares rise to the surface, and you keep trying to find at least three matching squares, touching squares before time runs out. The fewer squares you end with, the more points you get.

Anway, the Facebook version has been out for more than a month, and has seen some some solid growth already, having made our up-and-comers list for the past three weeks.

On November 10, it had 143,000 monthly active users. Today it has 414,000. Not Zynga-like, but also not too bad for a casual game that’s been ported on to Facebook. Ported isn’t quite the right word, as GameHouse has customized each version of the game for the platform it’s running on — the computer versions, for example, come with mini games. The Facebook version features daily and weekly tournaments, although we’re not sure if that feature was just added or has been around for awhile already. More, from the press release:

Players compete in weekly tournaments with their Facebook friends, each day introducing a different challenge and twist to keep even the most dedicated fan on their toes. As they compete with friends around the globe and earn coins to purchase valuable power ups, players will also find codes for use in the Mobile and PC/Mac versions.

We’ve seen another casual game creator, Popcap Games, get some good results around the tournament concept for its classic-turned-Facebook game, Bejeweled Blitz.

Meanwhile, social games appear to be getting the strongest results with asynchronous game play, in that you can play with friends without being online at the same time, as well as with appointment gaming, where each player needs to come back at a set time to complete an objective. The iconic example is FarmVille, where you can do things like earn points for weeding your friends farm patches, but also need to log in yourself to sow, weed and harvest your own virtual crops.

Daily or weekly tournaments are a mechanism to bring players back on a regular basis, instead of just randomly playing the game whenever they feel like it. Regularly scheduled tournaments, like what Bejeweled has done and what Collapse is doing now, are a way for casual games to have their own sort asynchronous, appointment mechanic. We expect to the idea continue to play out as more casual game developers experiment with Facebook.

[Editor's note: Earlier this week, we took a closer look at how games are affecting how people use Facebook, especially in Asia.]

We have written in recent months of Facebook’s growth in Southeast Asia. As we near the beginning of 2010, that trend does not appear to be slowing down. Throughout much of the region (except in China, of course, where Facebook is blocked), usage continues to rise. Some countries have seen incredible growth – Taiwan, for example, has added 5 million new monthly active Facebook users in the last 6 months alone – nearly 25% of the country’s total population.

What’s driving this growth? Increasingly, we’re seeing more users adopt Facebook in order to – you guessed it – play games. But not just any games – in many cases, games built by the growing number of Asian developers and publishers deploying titles on the Facebook Platform.

Taiwan is an interesting case study….

>Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Now, we have seen basketball games. We have seen basketball games on social networks. We have even seen coaching and management games on social networks. But now we’ve just seen a basketball management game that is a social network (well, a quasi one, at least). Okay, so perhaps Irondomain.com isn’t as robust as something like Facebook, MySpace, or hi5 but it does a highly focused niche for basketball fans that comes with many of the social features we have come to know and love.

Players can create profiles, add friends, create clubs (groups essentially), bookmark, view ladders, share what they are doing, and a myriad of other things. The game differentiates itself by offering a very full list of features for team management.

When the player signs up they are granted an arena, a budget, and a starting team. Conveniently, there is a fairly non-intrusive help window that takes you through what you should do step by step.

Players start by upgrading their home arena for more seats and thus larger spending budgets. Afterward, it’s on to adjusting team lineups, training, and individual player stats.

The help window is both a blessing and a curse. It tells the user how to increase their players’ statistics, but the problem is that it never goes away until you have done so with all players. Why is this a big deal? Because the game asks you to confirm every… single… point. Then it has to refresh the page, leaving the user to wait an obnoxious amount of time before moving on. After one player, it became a task in clicking around the site and figuring out what else there was to do (since the help still continues to say “upgrade a second player”).

As it turns out, the matches are where all these upgrade points come from, and by the looks of things, they run in a fairly realistic fashion. Each team is part of a league. As such, league matches are only played twice a week. If you are looking for further action, however, you can also play weekly friendly matches, regional matches, and international cups (some of which will have prizes).

Since Irondomain is a manager type of game, players are only able to set up various tactics on how their team should play (up to eight) in each match, and cannot play themselves. Some tactical examples include man-to-man defense, zone defense, and pick-and-roll.

Another interesting feature was the ability to find and recruit new players and coaches by sending out scouts. Frankly, it is really just a glorified search engine in which the user puts in the criteria they are looking for and a scout goes out for, literally, a few days to “search” for such NPC players. However, when compounded with the ability to buy and trade players, such a feature could prove a prudent virtual business method.

Overall, Irondomain is an interesting idea and currently garners over 100,000 users with an average daily of over 2000. Curiously, the developer states that they are getting a dramatic number of users from Southeast Asia and South America; over 50,000 to be more exact. Perhaps, this is due, in part, to a second soccer manager game that is offered to the best basketball managers. Soccer is, after all, the most popular international sport. Regardless of the reason, these numbers aren‘t too shabby, and based on them, Irondomain predicts that they will reach 1 million users within the next year.

It’s more of the same applications, for the most part, on our AppData list of the 20 social games that gained the most daily active users in the past week.

In the top place, Zynga held on to its lead with FarmVille growing at only six percent this week. However, that 6 percent increase is still 1.8 million people, a gain larger than six of the top 20 apps’ entire daily user bases.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	28,407,350	+1,818,215	+6.40
2.	Birthday Cards	2,995,309	+1,769,703	+59.08
3.	Happy Pets	2,591,872	+685,694	+26.46
4.	Pet Society	5,094,052	+369,350	+7.25
5.	FishVille	7,170,123	+363,752	+5.07
6.	Fish Isle	834,294	+356,148	+42.69
7.	Mafia Wars	7,021,764	+338,498	+4.82
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	4,727,388	+334,836	+7.08
9.	YoVille	3,233,857	+219,647	+6.79
10.	Is Cool by cafe.com	663,493	+199,009	+29.99
11.	Zoo World	714,341	+168,726	+23.62
12.	MindJolt Games	2,027,578	+167,233	+8.25
13.	Café World	10,334,369	+165,903	+1.61
14.	Treasure Madness	705,994	+153,878	+21.80
15.	Country Life	1,132,638	+137,265	+12.12
16.	Santa Yourself	145,149	+130,575	+89.96
17.	Crazy Planets	385,163	+124,371	+32.29
18.	Happy Aquarium	7,976,955	+123,832	+1.55
19.	Restaurant City	4,680,805	+119,573	+2.55
20.	Farm Town	5,069,861	+89,223	+1.76

Meanwhile, games with no rule set, competition or end goal like Birthday Cards and Santa Yourself pushed the boundaries of the genre (even by social gaming standards).

As such, Birthday Cards by RockYou!, second on the list, was able to expand its daily user base by 59 percent this week or a gain of 1.8 million average daily users. No stranger to the top ten in its first year-and-a-quarter on the market, the title still saw a one day surge of nearly a million people using the app, growing from nearly 2 million on December 8 to nearly 3 million users yesterday. That towers above its last month daily user average of about a million.

On the other side of the top 20, Christmas helped push the photo-manipulating app Santa Yourself by Viral to the 16th spot with an 90 percent increase and a 145,000 people using the novelty app each day. Also note, despite a decent showing of Christmas-themed apps overall on Facebook, Santa Yourself is the only holiday themed app in the gaming top 20 and doesn’t have any visible competition to that title on the horizon.

Competition in the fish-genre got a little more interesting however, with 6th place’s Fishville getting more competition out of newcomer Fish Isle by IGG Inc (#7) — although the comparison is a stretch because Fish Isle is more of a farming game, rather than a virtual aquarium game. Both were released on Facebook in November, but Fish Isle saw the larger increase in daily average users this week with 42 percent. However, while Isle’s 834,000 daily active users is respectable, it’s still far behind Fishville’s new dominance of the genre with 7.1 million.

And count on some black horse-type holiday game generating attention in the coming weeks as well before dropping off after the holidays.

Zynga apparently started promoting its new pet-caring game, PetVille, on Sunday, just a few days after launching it. Now, the game has nearly 6 million users.

This is not the first time that Zynga has had a social game become this big, this fast — it saw similar results with its two most recent releases, Café World and then FishVille. Its tactics typically include featuring the newest Zynga game on the toolbar it runs across all its games (meaning access to tens of millions of its usrs), as well as buying Facebook advertising. As we noted earlier this week, PetVille has gotten prime real estate on the toolbar.

But if anything, the huge growth in just a few days suggests the company is putting extra effort into making this one big. While the game actually went online on the third, promotion didn’t kick in until Sunday, judging by the numbers.

Interestingly, PetVille comes shortly a new potential rival to Zynga, CrowdStar emerged with a new pet-caring game, called Happy Pets. That company had a huge hit earlier this fall with Happy Aquarium, a virtual aquarium-caring game that has inspired a number of others, including FishVille. CrowdStar chairman Peter Relan recently told us this: “Every time they enter a category where we have gotten big, we’ll launch an entirely new game within weeks.” He told us to expect a new one this month.

Like many in the social gaming world, we believe that there’s room for many different developers to build a lot of popular games. But a lot of those games will likely continue to be made by Zyng.a

Social gaming company Playdom has hired an internet analyst, Christa Quarles, to be its new chief financial officer, according to a report in Business Insider earlier this week. The company has so far not commented on the report, although sources close to it have told us that it has hired a new CFO — and we assume that the person is Quarles.

She spent a decade at Thomas Weisel Partners, most recently serving as its internet services managing director, as Gamasutra notes (her TWP profile page appears to have since been taken offline). While she does not have direct experience running the financial operations of a public company, her job has made her knowledgeable about the markets and familiar with the process of going public; Forbes ranked her as a top brokerage analyst last year, for example.

This hire seems to confirm the IPO plans that Playdom’s leadership have alluded to in the past. The company raised a large first round of $43 million earlier this fall. After the funding deal closed, investor Tim Chang of Norwest Venture Partners said:

Our view of social gaming is it’s a pretty big space. It should be a market large enough to support multiple winners. The first was Playfish. Each of the big three should be able to get a pretty good outcome. The (remaining) big two could reach an IPO. One dynamic we like is that there are not that many companies reaching this kind of scale.

And then, after Playdom purchased a social gaming and an iPhone startup, we asked chairman Rick Thompson for his thoughts on the Playfish sale, and his own company’s future. “I think they’re a great company, and it was a personal decision,” he told us. “But would I have sold? No, our choice is to take it all the way.”

Electronic Arts is known for releasing many of its games in tandem with something else in order to boost initial popularity and sales. If it’s a movie game, it comes out just before the film. If it’s Madden, it’s released just in time for football season. However, as the behemoth delves deeper into social games, it has moved to new means of sale boosting – releasing free Facebook apps to support the console title, and thus EA shows us Need For Speed Nitro.

The full version of the game is for the Nintendo Wii and DS, but with more than 350 million users on Facebook, producing a social rendition seemed like a prudent marketing decision. Yes, “marketing” decision. It would be naïve to think that EA is looking to make significant revenue off this free app rather than promote the $50 Wii version.

As a matter of fact, this isn’t the first time the console developer has utilized Facebook for this reason. Relatively recently, the company had also launched a Facebook rendition of Dante’s Inferno – which sent many a social user to hell – in tandem with the full game launch.

Well, if there is any one thing EA knows, it’s marketing. Of all game companies, they have one of the largest budgets around, and frankly, Nitro is one pretty nice advertisement. Unlike other similarly-purposed “games,” – cough, LEGO Indiana Jones, cough – Nitro wasn’t too bad to play. Not too bad at all.

Like most racing games, players start off with one big clunker of a car and are baited to keep playing by some of the sleekest and sexiest looking racers out there. In order to unlock said cars, not only is a hefty sum of prize money needed, a certain number of earned stars as well.

What are stars you ask? They can be best described as race-specific achievements. For each race, the player chooses a track, up to three challengers, and items they wish to use in the race itself. Once they opt to begin, icons representing the four racers passively zoom about the track, in a top-down view, with a text feed showing what is happening. The whole ordeal takes about 20 seconds or so (at least on early tracks), and you can actually see where your car is slowing down, to improve your performance later.

Performance is actually the more interesting part of the game. While the race itself is unaffected by player input once it begins, users do have the ability to influence the outcome before hand. As players unlock stars for each race track, they earn points to put into driving skill. Remember how you can see the feed and the race occurring? Say your car slows down a lot on turns: You can put points into drifting and/or cornering to improve that skill and slow down less.

Another means of affecting the race is through three consumable items: Wrenches, Nitro, and Police Badges. Throughout the race, players can, in fact, be damaged by other cars, obstacles, and so on. Damage to your vehicle will obviously hinder capabilities, and the wrench will repair it, automatically during the race. Nitro, on the other hand, will provide a temporary, yet significant speed boost, and Police Badges will take a page from Mario Kart and misdirect any police attention from you to the lead car (think blue turtle shell).

As far as complaints go, they are minimal. Considering the likely purpose of Need For Speed Nitro, the app does a pretty decent job. If it were intended to fly completely solo and garner a great deal of longevity, the chief quip would have to be repetitiveness. The entire time, the player is going through the same motions: Race, upgrade stats, equip items, repeat; with only the occasional deviation to buy a new car. This can get boring after a while. The only other complaint is the user doesn’t seem to have a clear understanding of what icons are what. For example, it is rather hard to tell when you have points to put into your driving skill so it really just became habit to go to that part of the game periodically to check. Simple mouse-over alt text of some sort would be more than helpful in this sense.

Despite a few issues, it has to be reiterated that Need For Speed Nitro is unlikely to be an app intended for solo flight. In that regard, Nitro does an excellent job at coaxing some interest for the Wii and DS titles, as well as granting the player a bit of free fun in the process.