To say that social games are booming, is an understatement.  After having been in existence for only a scant few years, games on social networks like Facebook and MySpace are explosively gaining users.  There are now over 200 million monthly users playing the top 10 Facebook games alone 1, (up by 50 million from August to September).  Investors have certainly taken notice and, even in the depths of a recession, startups have been popping up left and right.  With money, comes conflict and social gaming has been no exception –already the space is a mire of me-too clones and lawsuits, with companies so busy looking over the shoulders’ of their neighbors that they’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. 

So, rather than dashing headlong into this new space, throwing money, resources and litigation blithely and blindly, it may behoove us to pause for a moment and consider, just what is a social game?   What are the rules of this brave new world?  A little critical thought up front might open up opportunities and save a lot of headache down the line.

 

What is a Social Game?

The term ‘social’ is perhaps not very descriptive.  Pong was social and so was Mario Kart and a thousand other games that are played by more than one player at a time.  So if ‘social’ doesn’t literally mean multiplayer, then what does it mean?  Does it imply something larger and more persistent?  Well, large persistent games aren’t exactly very new either; as long as there has been an internet, there have been games like MUD and its successors.  As the internet evolved, these multiuser games evolved right along with it, giving us games like Second Life and World of Warcraft.  These games are undeniably social, so why all the recent talk?  If social games are nothing new, what’s changed?

In some ways, nothing’s changed –games are still engaging and fun for all the same reasons they’ve always been- but in other ways, everything has changed.  Social networks like Facebook are bringing games into a completely new context: where, up until now, the user was compelled to find the game, now the game is able to find the user.  With this new power, comes exciting potential, game-changing potential.

The Building Blocks of Social Game Design

Social games can be defined by 3 basic features.

1.  Spread the game virally -promote recruiting friends
This facet of social game design is made possible by the widespread adoption of social networks like Facebook.  Social networks provide a pre-existing web of low-barrier-of-entry connections.  Games that tap into the trust and familiarity existing between friends have the opportunity to spread effortlessly on an exponential scale.

2.  Build a persistent society -promote cooperation
Beyond just allowing players to leave messages and compare scores, the goal of a social game should be to build a society.  But what defines a society? It might help to think of a society as a whole that is greater than its parts.  In order for players to feel as if they are part of something greater than themselves, interdependence should exist; a true virtual society will only arise from a game environment where players can’t fully succeed without the help of others.

3.  Maintain a consistent sense of discovery -promote user advancement and expression.
This feature simply describes a game environment where the user is continually discovering, building or nurturing new things into existence.  Players should feel as if they are evolving both their in-game persona as well as influencing the game world around them. 

 

Building Block 1 - Spread the game virally

On a social network, virality takes two forms: Direct and Indirect.

A direct invitation to join the game, given from one user to another, often takes the form of a request (come join me in this game).  Because of their unsolicited nature, direct requests are often perceived as intrusive and it helps if there is both a strong motivation and an innocent context, to facilitate the process as much as possible. 

The hit Facebook game, Farm Town, hides its requests under the guise of giving gifts.  You are allowed to give gifts to your friends and gifts are free to give, but you can’t give them to yourself.  Thus, gifts inspire a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ dynamic.

Gift-giving interactions exemplify the direct form of viral contact because they simultaneously fulfill selfish motivations (if I give my friend a gift, maybe he will join the game and give me one back) and maintain a sense of altruism (I’m giving my friend a gift, I bet she’ll love it) so senders feel less like they are spamming and receivers feel more like they are receiving something of value.  

Indirect –the broadcast

The other major advantage social networks is the ability to broadcast.  This takes different forms with different networks; in Facebook, it is the wall-post. A wall-post is nothing more than a public declaration made by an app on behalf of an individual. Almost any event in-game can be used to generate a wall post, but, if it is positioned as a call to action, it can serve as a means of reaching out to friends and spreading the game virally. 

In FarmVille, a common and effective wall-post is the ‘lost animal’, a post which declares that you have found a lost animal in need of a home and won’t someone please adopt it.  In game terms, this functions just like a gift -the only difference is the positioning: lost animals are served to a larger yet less-direct audience than gifts.

Building Block 2 - Build a persistent society

The two key words here are persistent and society.  ‘Persistent’ describes a game world that does not stop and start with each play session.  ‘Society’ implies a game experience founded in cooperation and teamwork.

Persistence
A persistent society ‘lives’ even when the player is not present.  A player knows that time spent away means potential missed opportunities and this can be a powerful hook that draws him back into the game at regular intervals.  In its most basic form, persistence can be contrived with timers (such as in Mob Wars, where you must wait for your henchmen to complete a job before assigning them to a new one) but in a full-fledged society, opportunities should also arise organically from the actions of other users.

Teamwork
Interdependence and teamwork are the foundations of a society and this is where MMOs like World of Warcraft excel.  WoW forces players to specialize; for example, a rogue is good at sneaking in for a devastating attack while a tougher warrior keeps a monster busy and absorbs damage.  Both players are more effective as a team than individually.  As players progress, and game objectives become more challenging, they need to learn to work together to succeed.  It’s this dynamic of teamwork that has retained more users for more hours than few games ever have.

Players that depend on each other feel needed.  Once a game establishes a persistent society of its own (and is no longer simply riding on a surrogate, like Facebook), abandoning the game becomes more than a personal decision; there are now the expectations of the group to consider.  A player that leaves will be missed, and this is a motivator not to be overlooked in our increasingly disconnected modern lives.

Building Block 3 - Maintain a consistent sense of discovery

Discovery is what keeps an activity fresh and interesting.  A player should never be allowed to feel as if he has ‘beaten’ or ‘completed’ a social game.  This means there always needs to be something else to acquire or experience.

Acquisition –the instinct to collect

Collecting ‘stuff’ is a powerful instinct in humans –from McDonalds happy meal toys to two-dollar bills, or even just stones we find at the beach, we humans are compelled to collect. 

In a game like Animal Crossing or Pet Society there is a heavy focus on this ‘collector’ model of discovery, with the collected items often being graphical elements that can be used to decorate your house.  Sometimes this ‘stuff’ is known and aspirational (I’m saving up to buy that entertainment center) and other times its unknown and mysterious (the seashell collection has two more slots left in it, I wonder what kind of shells they could be?).  Either way, it provides the user a straightforward goal of something to do and a longer-term sense of building something larger, as well as a gauge of status when comparing success with friends.  

In order to suspend reaching an ending, the ‘collector’ model of discovery typically follows an exponential effort curve on the route to getting more stuff; early additions to your collection are easily obtained and give you a taste for more, but further items require increasingly more effort and new goals are always cropping up just as previous goals are reached.   

User Expression –opening up the experience

The other model for discovery relies on user creativity.  The premise is basically to give the user a palette of tools that enable self-expression.  When users are enabled to express themselves, there will always be something else to see and experience because the community will be constantly creating new content.  The discovery comes from two sides: witnessing what other players have created, and discovering you own inner muse. 

A game like (fluff)Friends is ostensibly similar to Pet Society,  with the user collecting objects over time, but the ultimate gameplay objective goes beyond decorating your house how you see fit, to the deeper objective of creating images of art or storytelling.  The resulting scenes of (fluff)Art can be captioned and categorized, allowing users to browse galleries of their peers’ art.  The appeal is not so much to collect for collection’s sake, but to collect as a means toward self expression.

In games like YoVille or the Sims, players often grow bored with simple house decorating and set creative objectives for themselves, such as making a room look like a jungle or the inside of a space-station.  This phenomena was made the objective of the game (fluff)Friends.  (fluff)Friends is ostensibly similar to Pet Society, with the user collecting props and outfits over time, but the end goal is explicitly the creation of ‘(fluff)Art’. The appeal of the game becomes not so much to collect for collection’s sake, but to collect as a means toward self-expression.  The resultant scenes of user art are captioned, categorized, and publically browsable via in-game galleries. 

The creation of art is just one common example, yet the possibilities are much broader.  The game Little Big Planet harnesses user expression to allow the creation and sharing fully interactive gameplay experiences.

The Future
It’s a rare game where all three of the above building blocks (spread the game virally, build a persistent society, and maintain consistent discovery) are utilized to good effect.  This is not because the three are mutually exclusive but simply because they are served by distinct game mechanics that have evolved separately.  It will take self-conscious designers, willing to take cues from predecessors as diverse as Farm Town and WoW, to evolve the medium to the next level.

In particular, I believe, the context of cooperation still has much room for exploration.  A vast untapped gamespace exists between the insultingly simplistic gift-giving interaction of Farm Town and the dauntingly choreographed combat interaction of WoW.  Our daily lives are so rich with layers of social dependencies that it’s a small wonder the social gaming space is determined to cannibalize the same narrow range of ideas.  For years now, we’ve seen games that create discovery and there is now a wealth of games spreading virally across social networks, but the real key to compelling gameplay is in cooperation and the foundation of truly persistent societies.

1: http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php#/apps/directory.php?app_type=0&category=400