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

Cute Catz is a kitten adoption application from the developers of Pet Pupz, Matt Beswick and Nicola Borchard. The premise is simple: you adopt, name, and train an adorable kitten (represented in picture form).

In Cute Catz, your kitten has two basic needs: food and attention. You have a certain number of credits that you can use to buy him/her kitten food, milk, mice, etc. You can also train the kitten using a scratching post or you can play with them or give them toys to make them happy. The training becomes helpful when you enter your kitten in little kitty beauty pageants and tree-climbing competitions against your friends.  Aside from naming your cat, you can list their likes and dislikes. My cat likes mice, string, and the early works of Thomas Mann

The game play isn’t much to brag about right now, and doesn’t require much in the way of strategy and skill. However, the developers make frequent posts on the homepage and seem very dedicated to making the game better. They’re releasing new breeds, creating a “breeding” feature, and are trying to differentiate the application from its dog cousin.

The game still needs depth and something that will keep players coming back day after day. After several days with the application, my kitten was always doing ok and no matter how many times I trained/played with/and fed it, it couldn’t win a competition. So the game may have some balance issues too, but like a kitten, it’s in its awkward stage.

As it stands, this a fairly standard social game not unlike Armies or Vampires. You can invite your friends and get credits or win competitions against random opponents or your friends. The game could include some basic Flash animations to make the kittens more lifelike and interactive, but this is a good start. Still, it has a long ways to go before it can compete against the big applications.

Game play: 4

Development: 6

Cuteness: 7

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?

Classic Biplanes is a simple flash animation game developed by Michael Edlavitch.

The charmingly retro game puts you in control of a little biplane that must bravely shoot down other biplanes and unarmed parachuting soldiers. (I guess we’re supposed to assume these unarmed paratroopers have done something wrong to justify our shooting them down?)

The animation is very simple and the game play isn’t particularly deep or compelling. It does, however, have a two-player option for those of you who like to get chummy and share a keyboard. That said, for high schoolers who want to play a game while in computer lab, the two-player arcade elements may prove compelling.

There isn’t much to say for other social elements - the Facebook game is exactly the same as the flash game hosted on the website. There are other Flash arcade games out there, but few as boldly retro.

Game play: 4

Development: 3

Graphics: 2 (but they’re cute)

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

The 2nd annual Virtual Goods Summit 2008 is coming October 10 in San Francisco at UCSF’s Mission Bay Conference Center. While the specific format hasn’t been set, those interested can check out last year’s lineup and agenda to get a sense of what you can expect this year. Interested sponsors can also inquire at the VGS 2008 website.

As social games start to mature, so must the revenue streams. Industry leaders Zynga, SGN, and Playfish are all experimenting with virtual goods models with early success. While advertising will always provide valuable supplementary income, digital goods sales are vital to the future of the social gaming ecosystem.

VGS 2008 promises to dive into the hard questions around making virtual goods economies work and how virtual goods are impacting social networks and social application development. Here are the conference details:

Conference overview

The Virtual Goods Summit 2008 is a one day conference focused on the emerging market opportunity for virtual goods and economies. This year’s conference will build on the success of last year’s event and dive even deeper into some of the key themes facing industry participants today. We’ll feature a blend of panel discussions and expert-led breakout sessions covering everything from getting started with virtual goods to maximizing the revenue opportunity around virtual goods and virtual economies.

This year’s conference will bring together leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technologists, and industry participants to spend the day discussing the present and future of this exciting new space. We encourage you to join us at this year’s event and participate in what promises to be a lively conversation. We’ll spend some time discussing a number of exciting topics, including the following:

Panel topics

• Making Virtual Economies Work: Lessons from the Leaders
• Generating Real Revenue from Virtual Goods
• Virtual Goods and Social Networks
• What Users Want: Branded vs User-Generated Virtual Goods

Questions to address

• What does it take to successfully launch a virtual goods offering?
• What does it take to nurture and develop a successful virtual economy?
• Why are users embracing virtual goods?
• How are virtual goods impacting social networks?
• What strategies can developers employ to drive greater volumes of virtual goods transactions?
• How can developers tackle tricky issues around billing, payments, and fraud?

I never got into the Tamagotchi craze when I was a kid. Why would you play nurse to a poorly rendered fussy little alien? So I’m a bit leery about any pet-focused games on Facebook. But when I heard Playfish was doing a pet game, my opinions changed.

I’ve written in the past of the merits of Playfish’s games. To me, these guys are the Maxis or Valve of social gaming. Bowling Buddies, Word Challenge, and Who Has the Biggest Brain? are all quality applications and Playfish’s Pet Society, the company’s fourth title just released in beta, maintains the high standard. Pet Society combines the cute pet application with RPG elements to create an adorable, shiny, and deep application.

In Pet Society, you are given a creature to decorate and the ability to name your creature. Through beautiful Flash animation, customization is only a click away. Your pet is then placed in a house that you own, and you must maintain its happiness, health, and keep it well fed. These three statistics are kept in bars on the right hand side of your screen, and an experience bar sits on top. You get more experience the more you play the game, and this unlocks new features like more coins.

Initially, the house seems pretty confining. In your inventory, you can use such items as soap to keep your creature healthy and play a ball mini-game to keep him/her entertained. The TV plays clips from the other Playfish games - a very clever touch.

But once you leave the house, the game similarly leaves conventional pet adoption games and becomes something much larger. Your house is revealed to be part of a larger city with many municipal buildings, residences, and trees (full of coins, oddly enough). Navigating the city can be a bit confusing initially, and Pet Society’s beta status means that many of the features are “coming soon.” But it’s fun to step into a planned city that is already beginning to pick up.

The RPG elements become apparent quickly, like many quest-based adventure games you can buy most of the supplies you’ll need in the city. You can buy clothing and house decorations, interact with people in a soon-to-be-built café, engage your pet in competitions (again, coming soon), and interact with your friends in their houses.

You can also buy game money with real money through Paypal. “Reserving” land for your friends is Pet Society’s version of a friend invite, and it’s a clever way to make the game viral while maintaining the integrity of the experience.

Bottom line: it’s the first Flash RPG we’ve seen on Facebook that has major developers backing it. It stands on the shoulders of previous applications to create a clever hybrid that is well packaged and spiffy looking. It may run slow on some computers, and I worry that it doesn’t differentiate itself enough from its predecessors, but it’s definitely a step forward.

Developers: 8 (until they finish those features they promise)

Gameplay: 9

Originality: 5 (only thing I’m knocking them on here)

There are two reasons why most people stop playing a game. The first is I become frustrated by the game’s complexity, and the second is that I become bored with its simplicity. The Facebook game Battle of the Bands by Ryan and Cory Emmerson falls into the former category.

As a Facebook game, it makes excellent use of social networking capabilities, allowing you to invite friends, create bands, tour, and battle other rival groups for fame, money, glory, and groupies (okay, maybe not the groupies). Furthermore, the balancing of the game mechanics is well done, with a sort of resource management type of system that uses money, stamina, energy, and so on, where you use one to increase the other and such.

The designers have presented the player with any number of options (practice, shows, battle, tours, etc.) they can choose from to raise their band to the top and display themselves with in the “coveted” Top 40 list that is integrated into the game, but since Battle of the Bands is an older game, these Top 40 are so high above you it seems almost an impossible task to accomplish. And you can display your achievements in your Facebook profile, but I think that’s an expectation now for Facebook games.

However, While Battle of the Bands well balanced, it is also filled with complex resource management, and doesn’t align itself well with the demographic it is trying to reach. This demographic may not have the patience to learn how everything works - and with the wide breadth of mechanics, even I found myself bored trying to sort it all out.

This game could do a better job of giving me something that I can learn in five minutes  - and then a lifetime mastering. As a general design rule, all core game design features for a game should be able to fit on one piece of paper and should at least start with simple rule sets. Even complex and epic games like World of Warcraft have a simple core set of features that anyone can learn in just a few minutes: the player targets an enemy and clicks a spell. All other features are built around this basis, and as it gets more complex, the game teaches new players baby step by baby step.

Battle of the Bands, on the other hand, is neither easily or intuitively learned nor does it really teach you how to play. Sure there’s a help page, but honestly, who ever reads instruction manuals anymore?

The 2008 Social Gaming Summit, co-produced by Charles Hudson and Jeremy Liew this past June, has now posted online video of the conference sessions. These are highly recommended for anyone interested in learning more about the “social gaming” space.

Check out video from the following sessions: