Inside Social Games

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.

Popularity depends a lot on timing. If Jay Leno starting rattling off Reagan jokes now, they wouldn’t seem very timely and/or funny. Elections 2008 by Miniclip.com is making similarly dated jokes but almost gets a pass because they’re still funny.

Elections 2008 Fight is an arcade Flash game that allows you to play as Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in an old school throw-down. It’s a super delegate Street-Fighter where you can steer your candidate of choice to punch, kick, slap and beat down their opponent in a hilariously slapstick fashion. Unfortunately, the game only features these two fighters (although both spouses make cameos) and so it’ not as timely as it was about two months ago. Personally, I’d love to see John McCain’s animated character perform some kind of headbutt.

The animations are comical and the White House background is a nice touch. In addition to various punches and kicks, you can also throw a variety of super moves once your meter has run high enough. The fights last a long time and can get tedious, but it’s really rewarding to see politicians get the wind knocked out of them.

Still, there are some technical issues. On the development side, you can’t invite friends once you’ve loaded the game and you can only see high scores on miniclip.com. So the application isn’t trying very hard to become viral, which is a shame. The combat is also unsurprisingly shallow. The character sprites can overlap quite a bit and it’s not clear who gets priority (i.e. whose punch lands first) and the controls are sluggish and clumsy. This isn’t a fully developed fighting game, but with a bit more time spent on game physics and more characters, it could really be a hit.

Gameplay: 6

Development: 3

Timeliness: 2

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

This is a guest post by Malcolm Ryan, a Post-Doctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The original version of this post is also available on his blog.

Wordscraper is the new attempt by the Agarwalla brothers to keep the Scrabulous legacy alive. I am not going to comment on the legal issues, as others have done already. Rather, I’d like to explore what the comparison between Scrabble and Wordscraper teaches us about game design.

Last year I wrote a detailed design analysis of Scrabble as an exercise for my game design class. (I seem to have mislaid the document for the moment. I will try to exhume it if there is interest.) In it, I commented that the layout of bonus squares, particularly the double and triple word scores, is carefully strategic. A lot of the strategy of Scrabble play is about gaining access to those squares and preventing your opponent from doing the same. Often there is a trade-off when playing a word between maximising points and minimising the opportunity for your opponent to reach a bonus. These trade-offs are an embodiment of Sid Meier’s maxim: “A game is a series of interesting choices”. They are a large part of what makes the game fun.

The bonuses also determine the dramatic arc of the game. My games usually follow a pattern: an expansion from the centre following one of the diagonal lines of double word scores into one corner and then another. The triples are particularly hard to reach and their use marks a milestone in the drama of the game, with the possibility of a major turn-around in the scoring. Once a corner is “full” there is a lull as a new phase in the game begins as play expands into another corner.

Wordscraper, by eliminating predefined boards, loses this sense of drama. Randomly generated boards don’t offer the same choices or the same progression. Big bonuses arrive far too haphazardly, upsetting the scoreboard without the same build-up of careful negotiation. The work of game design is being neglected.

Boards can of course be adjusted by players, and some players may enjoy the process of inventing their own boards, but I predict the majority of casual game players will be disappointed. The default generated boards are simply not fun to play on. It is one thing to provide a level-editor as an addition to your designed content; it is another thing to provide no designed content at all.

I think Wordscraper could be rescued if:

1. They provided a small number of pre-designed boards which matched the quality of Scrabble’s careful layout, and
2. They provided players with the ability to share boards so that the average player can enjoy the work of the more skilled and motivated board designers.

Even so, I doubt that the design space is really rich enough to support innovative player-designed content. Is there another interesting board layout that is sufficiently different to the Scrabble standard to make it worthwhile setting up and playing? If they added more parameters than just the placement of bonuses (board size? hexagonal tiles?), maybe, but as it stands I think it unlikely.

In homage to Manveer Heir, I’d like to draw two design lessons:

Lesson one: Level design is a important part of game design. A good mechanism can be ruined by careless level layout. Use random levels with caution.

Lesson two: Level-editors should be provided in addition to well-designed content, not as a replacement for it. Level editors are pointless if the design space is not big enough to create interestingly different levels.

Rockstar Cars is a Facebook game that lets you “race” your friends, create teams, and display your achievements like medals of honor on your Facebook profile. As you play the game, recruit friends, and form teams, you earn points that allow you to upgrade your car from a dumpy looking van all the way up to sleek and sexy sports car.

Rockstar Cars integrates with Facebook pretty well. Perhaps the biggest draw is displaying your awards (namely your car) on your Facebook profile. This simple addition is attractive to most players, creating a form of bragging rights. Bragging rights is a critical feature to have in most online games, for many players will play games just for that one moment to show off.

Secondary to the display of one’s cars, the game coaxes you into social interaction in several ways. You acquire points for inviting people to play and more for forming teams. These points are then used purchase better and better vehicles. Furthermore, the game has built in chat and clubs to join.

While the chat itself is just an added bonus, you can also use points you earn to join clubs. These various clubs not only encourage the formation of online teams, guilds, clans, or whatever you want to refer to them as, but joining them also affects game play.

When you join a club, it grants you extra races a day (when starting out, you can only run 10 races every 24 hours), and earns you what is called “Rockstar Dollars.” This is where we reach a bit of a disappointment. When we start the race, there is an interesting RPG element to it, and you can use the Rockstar Dollars to sabotage your opponents. This is a simple, yet effective game play element: you select an option and, like in a turn-based RPG, a random number calculator determines the outcome. You almost expect an old school, Dungeon and Dragons style race (something like X happens: You do 1, 2, or 3?), but as soon as you click the race button…. the race is over and it randomly selects a winner. What the hell kind of race is that?! Considering the depth of thought put into the social networking aspect of the game, the actual game play was rather disappointing.

Even though the game itself is a let down, it does have tremendous potential, and it’s on the right track with the RPG elements. Rockstar Cars effectively utilizes the social capabilities of Facebook using achievement displays, encouraging multi-person play, joining of clubs, and supported chat. However, if they took the RPG element further and made an entire race out of it, the game would be made exponentially better.

It cannot be denied that the game is successful, with approximately 11,000 daily players - but considering you only actually play for about 10 seconds per race, how many are actually “playing” and how many are networking?

As the social gaming space continues to gain steam both within the social network development and game development communities, Inside Social Games will be keeping track of the top Facebook games. Here’s a  look at the Top 25 Social Games on Facebook as of today, August 3, 2008:

Notes on August 3, 2008 Rankings:

• Scrabulous, previously the 5th biggest game on Facebook, has been taken offline by its developers, the Agarwalla Brothers, after receiving a cease and desist from Hasbro. The Agarwalla Brothers have another title, Wordscraper, that has since been performing quite well.
• The removal of Scrabulous has also thrust EA’s official version of Scrabble into the ISG Top 25. Scrabble debuts this month at #21, with virtually all of its traffic coming since the Scrabulous disappearance.
• MyYearbook’s Owned, originally a clone of Serious Business’s Friends For Sale, continues to hold the top spot this month with nearly 700,000 daily active users.
• With 5 games in the list, Zynga takes the prize again the month for most games in the top 25.
• Playfish continues its dominance of the top 10, with Who Has the Biggest Brain coming it at #6, Bowling Buddies at #7, and Word Challenge at #8.
• SGN’s Nicknames is this month’s highest breakout performer, shooting all the way to #15.
• Bubble Town, YoVille, and Mob Wars were the biggest percentage gainers this month. YoVille was rewarded for its success with an acquision by Zynga two weeks ago.

This is a guest post by Christopher Mack.

Until recently, Electronic Arts was the largest developer and publisher of video games in the world. But despite the company’s staggering profits, one of their top development executives, Neil Young, recently made the decision to leave his 11 year home to lead development of mobile games for the iPhone platform with new startup Ngmoco.

With estimated iPhone sales by 2009 at around 45 million, it is no wonder that game developers see potential to create games for the platform. From a design standpoint, the capabilities of the iPhone are up there with Nintendo’s Wii and DS systems. The built in accelerometer allows for the orientation of the iPhone to be translated into game commands (allowing for innovative and intuitive game play), and the built in messaging, email, and global positioning adds further possibilities to compete, play, and socialize with not only real world friends, but people from all over the world.

Now with 3G, the iPhone is even more usable than before with faster network access, and the large touch screen provides ample opportunity for creative and intuitive design in small, casual games. However, it is the open internet and connection to real world friends that opens the doors to social gaming opportunities.

Mobile devices including the iPhone are already used in abundance for social communication amongst much of the world’s population. Recent statistics have shown that in the US 63% of people ages 18-27 use mobile text messaging, 31% of people ages 28-39, and 18% of people ages 40-49 - with over 4.7 billion text messages sent on average each month. Clearly, people use the social aspects of mobile devices. In addition, there are over 1 million java game downloads per month on average on mobile devices. There is clearly potential for a new class fo social gaming applications to emerge on the iPhone.

The iPhone’s phenomenal internet capabilities make it much better than that of other mobile devices for social/online game development.  The iPhone has the capability to locate users using GSP or cell tower triangulation, and connects to the internet both on cellular and Wi-Fi networks. With the release of the iPhone 3G, users can access GSM, EDGE, UMTS, and HSDPA networks. Just like a laptop with Wi-Fi capabilities, the iPhone will ask if you wish to connect to a network and for a password. When Wi-Fi is active, the iPhone will automatically switch to any other nearby, previously approved, networks.

And according to Google, the iPhone generates 50 times more search requests than any other mobile handset. Deutsche Telekom states that the average internet usage of an iPhone customer is over 100MBytes (30 times that of the average contract-based consumer)! This includes everything from email, chat, iTunes, YouTube, mySpace, Facebook, and virtually ever other social network people use. Clearly, the iPhone is ready for prime-time web applications.

Perhaps the biggest change in the business model for iPhone developers is the new gatekeeper: Apple. Traditionally, mobile games are payed for when they are downloaded. With the iPhone, Apple controls all application downloads through the App Store. Whether or not developers feel too much risk in developing in such a world remains to be seen. In the past, anything but a pay-per-download model for games on mobile devices has struggled - subscription based payments have only ever had limited success.

All the tools needed for the construction of great social games are already built into the iPhone, and the iPhone has already been adopted by the millions of consumers. Now it falls to the developers to build the next generation of games for a new platform. Who will becme the leader in mobile social games on iPhone?

A day after Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla took the game offline in the US and Canada, the team of Indian brothers has relaunched the game with a new name and board design: Wordscraper. Wordscraper uses the same UI as the old Scrabulous and is played essentially the same way Scrabble is played, but with different “bonus tiles” and board dimensions.

Meanwhile, the official version of Facebook Scrabble, developed by EA under license from Hasbro, has experienced continued growth in the first day since Scrabble’s disappearance: usage has grown to nearly 60,000 daily active users. At its peak, Scrabulous drew over 700,000 daily active users.

We’ll track the growth of both games to see whether users will migrate to Wordscraper or the official version of Scrabble.

Acid-trip inspired physics lesson or nightmarish balloon fantasy world? I can’t decide.

The Blobs Game inside Facebook is an arcade Flash game where you launch a round little ball towards other brightly colored balls before they multiply and rise to the top. You must effectively keep their populations in check without being able to ever effectively kill all the blobs. It’s like how hunters in New Jersey used to come out and thin the numbers of deer so they wouldn’t take over Jersey’s easily stormed state Senate.

The major problem is that this game never ends. Keep launching your little ball of destruction at the rising collections of balls and they’ll still multiply. Ultimately, you will lose. The blobs will win. How long this will take depends on how many drugs you’re taking/how long it takes you to become bored and stop. The answer to the latter question for me was five minutes

There’s a leaderboard and a way to invite your friends. There are also better arcade games out there with better animation and have less irritating sound tracks (think weird trance music). But if you feel like playing something weird and inescapable, give it a try.

Gameplay: 4

Development: 3

Trippiness: 9