Giving Players a Chance to Socialize
Raph Koster is a designer who’s blog posts are always worth reading. His thoughts on the future of single-player were a big inspiration on my decision to focus on Social Games.
He’s just dropped a big post on ways to make virtual spaces more social, and there’s plenty of good stuff in there to mull over, not the least of which is that the ability to have an in-game way to reflect on your experiences (virtual and otherwise) is a key part of the socialization process. He points out that you need to actively incentivize players in order to get them to engage in activities that create social opportunities. There’s a subtle difference between that and just giving them straight rewards for being social, and I think it’s an important one.
In a much more limited environment like a Facebook game, that means giving the user the opportunity and the ability to share elements of their current Status with other players. The main problem right now is that the only way you can share that information is by putting it up on your wall and sharing it with everybody. That dilutes the impact, since most of your friends probably don’t care what you’re doing in Mob Wars, and your Mob Wars friends are much less likely to notice what happened to you and be able to comment on it in any significant way. Why not have Mob Wars update me about how my other friends in the game are doing and also give me the ability to comment?
Communication about status is a key social activity. In the end it’s the primary thing you do on Facebook, so it’s ironic that it isn’t being well exploited by the current generation of Social Platform Games that appear on it. Part of that is, of course, that those elements of social sharing can often be the ones that are the most easily exploited, so they tend to get locked out by the Terms of Service.
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