Social Game Development
The Collapse of Complexity and the rise of Social
Because games are built out of much of the same conceptual materials as the web itself (code and art), they’ve resisted a lot of the economic shockwaves that have created such a disturbance in traditional media. But they’re not immune to it. We’ve had ample proof over the last year that any genuine growth is [...]
The Ten Most Significant Social Games of 2009
My article on the subject has gone up on Inside Social Games. While it’s easy enough to figure out what the most popular games are simply by going over to AppData and looking at the numbers, I thought the end of the year might be a chance to reflect on what were some of the [...]
Love and Hate Are Always Better Than Like.
Set Godin pulls apart a New York Times article on user feedback for the Kindle, and mentions something that everyone interacting with user metrics should be keenly aware of: Amazon reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great [...]
An Eightfold Path for Social Game Development
Someone asked about what it takes to create a social game. This is incredibly stripped down, but here is my basic formula I use with my clients: 1) Figure out what your fundamental gameplay dynamic is going to be as early as possible. IE, what is it the fundamental unit of play that the user [...]
Zynga gets shut down- Updated
After writing a few days ago that I felt that Michael Arrington had unfairly targeted developers as being culpable for scam advertising offers, Zynga goes ahead and proves me wrong by allegedly blocking the IP addresses of Facebook employees from seeing certain ads, and getting Fishville banned in the process. That’s led to Facebook taking [...]
“The Future of Games” is featured on SlideShare
The slides from my presentation at PAX are being featured on the front page of Slideshare today. If you haven’t checked them out, go take a look.
Are Social Games like newspapers?
As I’ve been reading more and more about the collapse of print newspapers, and what the real business of print news was behind the articles, the parallels to Social Gaming are becoming more and more obvious. One thing that’s important to remember as the industry pushes forward is that while the actual game is the [...]
Latest Post on ISG: Social Games are a Constant Deployment Environment
My latest and greatest column is up over on ISG. I’m concentrating on articles about social game development, including the opportunities and challenges of making games for social platforms. If that interests you definitely take a look. Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about new entries for Mediashifters. I may talk about more general gaming trends, since [...]