To be known as a “social game”, games need to have a number of
elements that encourage player engagement amongst friends. Players
need to be able to interact with their real world friends in many ways:
they want to compete, cooperate, show off to and taunt friends. To
better understand the ‘social’ in social games, we put together a list
of the 7 elements that should be included in every social game.
7 Features That Should Be In Every Social Game
The most important feature of a social game is a user’s real-world
friends list. So when I invite friends to play, or look at the
leaderboard, I should be able to see my personal friends in my social
network. This is one of the main aspects that make today’s “social
games” different than social games of the past. It’s not like today’s
social games are the first to use buddy lists and social features, but
it used to be such that I was playing against random people that I had
met within the game. That’s fun for certain players, but it’s hard to
deny that being able to cooperate or compete with a real-world friend is
a stronger social experience. This feature is activated by ensuring
your game is a Facebook application or uses Facebook Connect, so players
can import their real world friends.
One of the key elements of today’s social games is the ability to buy
gifts for your friends. Whether it is alerting friends’ to stray
animals in Farmville, handing a drink across the table in Mafia Wars or
buying someone a new couch in Pet Society, gifting is one of the most
popular activities available. This can be traced to the early days of
the Facebook application platform as well, when applications like
“kisses” and “superpoke” were the top games in the network and pretty
much revolved around sending premium gifts to one another. Facebook
itself has a gifting element to the site, and estimates have them
sending around 100 million paid gifts per year (at a revenue of $100
million!). Gifting is certainly a staple of social games, and should be
included in any title.
Almost any social game you play today will have some sort of
always-present leaderboard. I first knew leaderboards had a strong
social element when I saw them on Who Has the Biggest Brain by Playfish
in late 2008. Every player that would start the game would inevitably
look down at the leaderboard and realized where their high score ranked
amongst their real friends, and the leaderboard also highlighted the
overall top three. In an IQ comparison game like WHTBB, this fostered
an extreme sense of competition that was almost inescapable: if you
played the game, you were in a competition with your friends to see who
was smarter. This type of Playfish leaderboard has now been used across
every game, and rightly so, as it makes every game session a social
experience.
Challenges were the first feature that alerted me to the power of
social games, and that was when I played Jetman in early 2008. The game
itself was one of the simplest I’d ever played, and gameplay consisted
of holding down a button to turn on Jetman’s jets and allow him to hover
through a cave. The great thing was, at the end of every game, I was
asked whether I wanted to use this score to challenge a friend. So
within one click, I was having a head to head competition with my cousin
halfway across the world, and the rivalry got heated. It almost seemed
like the challenge element was as important as the gameplay: we were so
obsessed with beating each other that it wasn’t even important whether
the game was any fun. Challenges have been implemented in almost every
game available today, and need to be part of any social games
experience.
Having chat and messaging within the game is a delicate proposition
in Facebook. Since players already have many means by which to contact
each other, through the Facebook chat and message systems, designers
need to ask how they want to control messaging in gameplay. In Pet
Society, users have the ability to send small text notes to one another.
An incoming messages appears as a small envelope that rests by the
door of the recipients’ house. The fact that these are small tangible
objects give the messaging a bit of a ‘gift’ feel, and serves to
reinforce the gifting element of social games as well. Players need to
have some way to contact each other, and even if that means creating a
discussion board on your Facebook fan page, it needs to be easy for
players to know how they should be reaching out to others.
Grouping together with friends is certainly a staple of social games,
and while it’s not a particularly involved element of many social games
at this point, it will likely evolve into a more important feature.
Games like Mafia Wars rely strongly on the ideas of “mafias”, which are
groups of players that help each other complete missions to gain
experience and gold. The teamwork in the game is still minimal, and
just having someone in your mafia means that they will automatically
join you when you need it, but that dynamic may change as the ‘mafia’
type games evolve. I would like to see something like a mafia relying
on the diversity of its mafia to complete special missions, so that
actively recruiting new types of players is encouraged.
In a social game it is an important social feature to be able to
customize your avatar, your house or your room to show off to others.
The point here being that the expression of individuality is something
that adds to the social experience, so that players can enjoy their
friends’ creations. What would Pet Society be if you couldn’t design
your room to look the way you want it, and show it to your friends? My
choices of how I structure my farm in Farmville are sometimes directly
related to sharing that design with my friends, and showing off my
personal style. This is a social element that increases with time as
the games increase in complexity. Players will be customizing more than
just aesthetic elements, for instance designing levels for other
players.
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