Inside Social Games

Checking out a game in its beta phase can be dangerous, but given the iterative nature of social game design, I checked out the “newest games” tab in Facebook this week. As such, Divine Division is only a skeleton of a game for which a community and new features are planned. Whether these will actually happen, or you should be part of them, remains to be seen.

Divine Division puts you in the role of St. Peter, at the pearly gates of heaven. Your task is to sort the worthy from the wicked, the good from the evil. These are represented by little white and black souls that bounce all over the screen and you must separate by controlling the gate in the middle. As a game concept, it’s either really silly or cynical - I’m not sure which. Human souls are now bouncing around like pong pellets and the people determining our fate have a time limit and a really bland interface.

How’s the game play? You’ll get bored quickly, but that’s to be expected with a game still in the early stages. Tabs labeled “Friends top scores,” “wall of fame,” “my tournaments,” and “collection” are all pretty standard social networking elements. In order to unlock the collection element of the app, you must invite more friends. It has the pieces in place to be a social game.

The one thing the developers do well here is sell advertisements. Powered by MochiAds, an ad greets you as you start the game, shortly followed by a “yougame.com” ad from the developers, and if you beat a level, another ad between stages. In many of the tabs, the actual function of the tab is featured below an ad for other applications apparently also developed by the creators. This is not the next Peggle or Snood, but a cheap flash game that advertisers got roped into and if you’re not careful, you will too.

Gameplay: 1

Developers: 6

How big a trap: 7

Before Snood, before Dr. Mario, and before Scrabulous there was Tetris. Tetris is the ultimate in old school puzzle games. A killer Cold War-era soundtrack, a great concept, and an increasingly challenging game design made it one of the first real gaming hits.

Tetris Friends is the best adaptation I’ve seen of Tetris to the Facebook Platform. Tetris Friends is actually three variations of Tetris in one - Marathon Tetris, Tetris Solo, and Tetris Blockstar. The latter is old school Tetris while Tetris Solo is a time-based game that pushes you to rack up as many points as possible in the time allotted. Marathon Tetris is the updated standard game with better graphics, a remixed soundtrack, and the ability to see where your block will be placed before you place it (that’s cheating in my book). The interface is friendly and you can even pause the game and adjust various controls including sound and affects. It’s one of the first games I’ve seen to afford the player those kind of options.

The social elements for games like this are all there: You can challenge your friends, see their scores, or invite other players into the game. That said, there have been Tetris versions in the past where players can compete in real-time against each other, including things like bombs and various other traps to screw over the opposing player. So Tetris Friends is well-adapted to the Facebook setting, but it has room for improvement.

Tetris Friends is easily the best Facebook Tetris game I’ve seen, and worth checking out if you, like me, can’t get the theme song out of your head.

Game play: 9

Development: 8

Music: 9

Sharendipity is a new platform for building social games. While the company has been around for over a year, the Sharendipity platform (still in alpha) is one of the first robust tools we’ve seen that simplifies and modularizes the social game design experience. We sat down with Greg Tracy, one of the creators of Sharendipity, to learn more about it.

Sharendipity is uniquely extensible. Individuals can leverage or contribute to a growing library of modular content such as game characters, behaviors, special effects, artwork and sounds – which piece together in new and surprising ways. Anything made in Sharendipity can be shared back to the community either in whole or as smaller, reusable components. When those creations have value, Sharendipity provides a secure, integrated marketplace for buyers and sellers to transact.

Is it still possible to get in “under the hood” and make changes using code?

So it’s a lot like design programs like Dreamweaver: easy to learn, difficult to master?

How forgiving is the Sharendipity design experience? Even if it is a GUI interface, how much does syntax, event ordering, and so on come in to play?

Issues involving syntax are eliminated. However, if a user is trying to create brand new logic, there will still be a need to understand some basic programming concepts. Hopefully that user will be able to find the logic in the community and re-use it just like any other action in the system.

We’re also creating tools that allow component authors to define integration points. Sort of like a user defined wizard for every modular element in the community. Rather than having to worry about the “how” (such as order) of hooking things together, you’ll simply be instructed to provide the “what”. For instance, if you were to integrate a scoreboard into your game, the scoreboard author will provide an integration point that allows you to specify where the score value is being stored or may provide the user with an action to use when they wish to update the score. The author of the component can determine these integration points themselves.

How do art integration and animations work?

Every core object in the system has an image property associated with it. That means you can simply drag and drop any image onto an object. Actions can also be used to dynamically change an object’s image as well, or to step through frames in an animated GIF.

Since there are tools to help the programmatically challenged, do any exist for the artistically impaired?

Another great “oh, cool!” moment occurred when we created a painting application within Sharendipity called Painterdipity. It is a very primitive paint program built entirely from the platform’s core features. An interesting concept is that in the future the community might evolve this application into a more sophisticated paint program. Perhaps with special tools for the “artistically impaired”!

A designer tool for mainstream games called “Unreal Kismet” provides a visual GUI for designers that allows them to use Unreal Script without having to write lines and lines of code for level events. Essentially, they write small events, and connect them together almost like Microsoft Visio. How does this compare to Sharendipity?

We’re different in a few ways. Most importantly, the end goal of Kismet is still to produce code. They’re just trying to make it easier to visualize the logic. We want to provide total abstraction, and completely eliminate the need for producing code. In fact, when a user is creating a behavior for their evil enemy character, we never produce any code. That’s why users can instantly see, test, and tweak their logic in a live environment. There is no compilation step using Sharendipity!

For all intensive purposes, Sharendipity is one of the first “game engines” I’ve seen for social games on Facebook. Being a first of its kind, do you see it as becoming the Unreal Engine of its genre?

It’s a glorious day in a nascent industry when cheaply-produced movie tie-in titles are released. Just as console gamers have experienced Iron Man and Hulk games recently, social gamers now get to do the same.

Traitor - Special Agent Games is actually three small games in one - or, depending on how you look at it, one big movie advertisement with three little widgets that you can play with. However you look at it, it’s not a real social game, but a glorified ad unit. Essentially, the screen shows you a link to the movie’s website and three games you can click on to perfect your “spy” knowledge.

With “Think Global” you’re given a name of a city and a country and a blank map. With your mouse, you must point out where that city is. You only have a limited number of “resources,” which are essentially “mistake points.” For every mile off from where the city actually is, you get a point. When you run out of resources, you lose. It’s that simple. And since it’s almost impossible to get your mouse to click exactly where the city should go, it’s frustrating too.

The “Photographic Memory” game asks you a series of questions after you review five photos. I took this quiz four times with the same questions and still have no idea what some of the answers are. There is no variety - the questions and pictures don’t change.

“High Value Target” is the third and final “game” and lacks instructions. Essentially, you try to block in the little person icon so they can’t escape the grid. The most challenging part of this game is trying to figure out how to play.

Traitor - Special Agent Games lacks any real social elements, and was really made just to promote the movie. Nevertheless, it’s one of the first of this genre that we’ve seen on Facebook.

Development: 3

Game play: 1

Preliminary movie review: 3

Earlier this week, SGN announced that it has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation for the release of a highly polished social game on Facebook: Space Movers: The Bloom Initiative. Now, with the addition of a cause implemented into game play, players can play a game and “save the world” while doing so.

As players play Space Movers, SGN will donate up to $50,000 in revenue (the equivalent of 50,000 trees) to the Arbor Day Foundation. The emotional appeal of “gaming for a cause” within Space Movers shows a new way games may be used to help motivate social action. Space Movers offers substantial rewards for playing socially and “contributing” to the cause - the more you play, and the more people you invite to play, the more goes to planting new trees. In fact, you also can actually see the exact number of trees you yourself have “planted.”

So, how is the actual game? In addition to the whole “green” hook, it is actually fun to play, and unlike a number of Facebook games, you CAN play alone if you so choose. However, it isn’t a terribly original game design, as it follows the Bejeweled “connect three colors” concept rather religiously. In the past, social games we’ve seen on Facebook have been focused a great deal on the viral growth aspect so much that there is often a great neglect when it comes to design and presentation. Even though Space Movers is a game that most of us have seen before, it does a good job of fitting a familiar game mechanic it into a social context.

What is most impressive though is the overall quality of the game. The game looks clean, plays well, is easy to learn, and there are no real bugs. It looks beautiful, and is a leap forward in improving the genre as a whole.

Where does the game need improvement? The main thing that comes to mind is the lack of game play modes. Most games like Space Movers have various puzzle modes, like time trials as well as marathon. Unfortunately, Space Movers only really has one mode; the difficulty doesn’t ever increase, and there really isn’t much of an objective beyond earning high scores. At the very least, it should include multiple stages with score objectives in order to progress to new levels.

Overall, however, Space Movers is a marked improvement over previous social games. Overall quality and presentation are fantastic, and it’s one of the first of its kind (”gaming for a cause” I guess you could call it). It will be interesting to see where SGN goes from here. And hey, it’s not often that you can say you’re saving the world while playing a game!

Word Twist on Facebook by Zynga is quite similar to TextTwist on MSN Games: the game play and design are almost identical. The primary difference, of course, is that Word Twist allows you to easily play with friends.

However, while you are able to play against your friends competitively, the game doesn’t really make use of the social network much itself. It takes a single player game, allows two people to play at the same time, and tells you “here are the words you unscrambled” and “here are the words they unscrambled.” “Oh, and by the way, here are your scores. This person wins!” That’s all fine, but all you’re doing is playing a single player game, receiving a score, and seeing who scores higher.

Before the game starts, you have the ability to adjust round time, word length, and dictionaries. This game is simple, and a lot of people play it, but the fact of the matter is there is a tremendous amount of social interaction opportunity that the game misses out on.

Social games like Word Twist are only scratching the surface of the potential of social game design. Designers need to look the capabilities of social networks and find new ways to have people play WITH each other. The games can still be simple, but by allowing more social interaction, people would play for longer periods of time.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a flash puzzle game where you launch colored balls at other colored balls to clear the colored balls and win. Pengapop by Blackdot is such a (woefully) unoriginal game.

The twist this time is that you’re a penguin leading a sweet-toothed penguin army who must clear these balls in order to obtain various sweets to feed your troops. In practical terms, this means that the object of the game is not to get the most combos or clear all the balls, but rather to hit all of the bonus icons you see floating around. Combine this change with the addition of a timer and you’ve got a different type of strategy game. Barely.

I do have to applaud Blockdot for creating a puzzle flash game that is actually challenging and has a lot of levels. You can even unlock multiple penguin launchers for a different experience as well. By downloading Power Player Trix, you can also get access to 200 levels and multiplayer options.

The learning curve is pretty forgiving but some levels are much more challenging than others. If you’re into this type of game, it’s on par with some of the higher-end ones you’ll find on Facebook. The Achilles’ heal for all of Blockdot’s games are the social elements…they suck. You must navigate away from Facebook in order to post your score, there’s no chat feature, once in game you can only invite friends through email, etc. etc. Oh, and depending on your computer, you might be waiting a while to load the game.

Once Blockdot gets hip to how to better promote its games, the developer will be firing on all engines and can hopefully churn out some really exciting apps.

Gameplay: 7

Development: 4

Originality: 2

It’s a shame that Pogo.com is a bit late to the game with their latest word-scramble application, because it’s a great little app. Word Whomp Dash demands you power a little gopher powered car. With what power you ask? How about the power of words. That do anything for you? We’re talking vocabulary, Holmes.

In simpler terms, you need to make as many words as possible given the letters listed before time runs out. Each scrambled word you find gives gas to power your little gopher-mobile. You can rearrange the letters as many times as you’d like and even pass on a set of letters and get some new ones, though you’ll lose time. The more words you make, the faster and further your gopher will go, the more experience and points you’ll get, and the more time you’ll be awarded.

By gaining more experience and inviting more friends you’ll be able to unlock additional cool vehicles for your little gopher. The animations that surround the game are detailed, original, and adorable. The game provides a different package for the typical scramble game, and has plenty of challenge/leader/invite features to keep players connected. The experience element will hopefully lead to even more bonus features for dedicated fans, and if this game takes off, will likely lead to a dedicated fan base.

I only worry that this game is late to the game against equally well-developed applications. If you like this particular gopher-flavored word scramble game, this might be your cup of tea.

Gameplay: 7

Developers: 8

Difficulty: 7

Combine one part Tetris, one part Dr. Mario, and one part Snood, and you’d get the aptly named Brick Breaking game on Facebook.

A puzzle game that asks you to clear the board of bricks, the game is more challenging than it first appears. You can only clear bricks that are in groups either horizontal or vertically touching. Initially this makes clearing the brightly colored bricks easy, but in the end you’ll inevitably be left with bricks of differing colors on opposite sides of the board and no where to turn. You only have a certain number of magic wands you can use to clear single bricks, and a poor use of clearing bricks early will mean you’ll be burning those wands early and often. You run out of magic wands and you lose.

I must admit this is one of the more challenging Facebook puzzle games out there. The Flash animation isn’t anything spectacular- only a handful of colors and very little game variety. It may keep some puzzle players coming back for more, or it may turn off casual gamers just as easily. The developers have a leaderboard set up, but a lot of the players on the boards keep complaining about inflated scores - suggesting that people have figured out a way to cheat.

There is also a tournament mode and a “collection” tab which can only be unlocked by inviting friends. The tournaments don’t work and this indicates to me the developers may be napping on keeping up with the application. The boards are littered with insults and offensive comments too, and while I don’t normally discredit a game for such behavior, I do think it’s an indication of how committed the moderators are to maintaining the community.

The puzzle aspect is compelling, but not enough to differentiate it from more well-developed Flash games… and the community aspect isn’t exactly “welcoming.”

Gameplay: 6

Development: 3

Difficulty: 8

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