Facebook games
Latest
Richard Garriott and the choppy waters of social gaming
The term "social games" or its frequently-used cousin "Facebook games" is one that gets talked about a lot by MMO gamers these days. Specifically, it gets talked about in a similar tone to the UbiSoft DRM nightmare or the entire Infinity Ward fiasco. So it's going to turn some heads -- and raise some hackles -- when Richard Garriott moves into the social gaming scene. Creator of the genre-setting Ultima Online and the much-discussed Tabula Rasa, Garriott has explained in an interview with Gamasutra why he made the shift and what he thinks of the social gaming scene as it stands now. In short, he sees in social and mobile games the same things that marked other major shifts in the overall philosophy of making games, making them the next big wave. It's not an uncommon sentiment, but he goes on to point out that many of the virtues these games have, such as no installation and no up-front cost, are desirable traits in any game. He goes on to discuss stories in games and how he thinks that even social games can have them, even as he advocates less emphasis on freeform player-generated narratives. Take a look at the full interview to get a clearer picture on what we can expect from Garriott next -- and considering his place in the field of MMOs, it should be notable.
The Fringe: Farming games
Welcome to The Fringe, where we totter on the edge of MMOs with a guide for playing Facebook games. If you aren't one of the millions playing games on Facebook and aren't interested in joining the throng, that's ok. We won't judge you. But we'd appreciate you returning the favor. In before all the "you got Facebook in my Massively again!" complaints: GDC was full of Facebook game announcements and with all the money being made by Zynga and others, we have a long future of Facebook MMOing ahead of us. With massive amounts of people playing and interacting in these online games, it's time to take off the blinders and check out what's going on in your peripheral gaming vision. Or not. That's fine. If you don't want to read about Facebook games, you can skip to all of the other great content here on Massively. But unlike my last column, where I let the haters vent their frustrations in the comments, only constructive criticism will be allowed from now on. I was going to write up a guide to Country Life next, but it has been going through much development over the past few weeks. So even if illness hadn't delayed my writing about it, the information would have been obsolete soon after. There are many farming games to choose from, varying in features and popularity. So this week I'll be covering how to choose a Facebook farming game by giving an overview of three notable ones.
GDC10: Our chat with Echo Bazaar's Alexis Kennedy
We caught up with Echo Bazaars's Alexis Kennedy to ask him about the wildly successful Facebook style game. It's hard to describe, easy to pick up and addictive to play. Picture an underground city populated by murderers, spies and all types of shady characters, add in a unique story and Twitter functionality and you wind up with this little gem. "It's more of a single player experience than I'd like." said Alexis, who is the Chief Narrative Officer for the game. "We are always looking at ways to make it more social, we want to give more direct ways to interact with other people. I want to get as much variety in there as possible. But it's finding the right balance of making somebody's experience unique to them without going crazy trying to cater at every possible stage." But how to combat a player feeling as though his or her experience is devalued by seeing the same thing come up in their friend's streams? "The way to deal with that, really, is just to write more content."
Runes of Magic will be heading to Facebook with RoM: The Challenge
When it comes to Facebook games, some MMO players look at them as being a scourge; a strange offshoot of a genre they know and love. To others, it seems the next logical step in gaming. And nobody can doubt the revenues involved are sweet for companies who manage to hook casual gamers into their games. But now, we have a heads-up from the team at Frogster Interactive that they plan on trying to cross their successful Runes of Magic IP into the Facebook casual gaming market. Dubbed Runes of Magic: The Challenge, this new social media game (currently under development) will use the lore from Runes of Magic in a whole new casual game. The Facebook game is said to use networked gaming and viral communications and will give players "adventure, exploration, and strategy elements." Through playing the casual game, people will gain cards with key codes that work inside Runes of Magic -- thereby potentially drawing some new players off of Facebook and into the full MMO. Our team at GDC has an interview with the Frogster Interactive and Runewaker Entertainment teams coming up later today, where we're sure we'll hear far more about this interesting new gaming development. We'll bring you all the details as soon as we have them!
Activision: Farmers Could Kill WoW?
No, not those kind of farmers, but rather the 82 million+ users currently growing the garden of their virtual dreams on Facebook's wildly popular Farmville sim. Activision-Blizzard's annual 10k report, filed on March 1 and analyzed by Robert Purchese over at Eurogamer.net, is chock full of worrisome anecdotes about the future of their massively multiplayer behemoth as well as some interesting tidbits regarding payment models. While the report stops short of painting a completely dire picture, Acti-Blizz clearly considers the growing social gaming scene a major threat to its stranglehold on the massive genre. "A substantial portion of our revenue and profitability will depend on the subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game category," proclaims the report. "If we do not maintain our leadership position in this category, our financial results could suffer." Sound like common sense? Maybe, but it should be interesting to watch the current market leader adapt to the rapidly expanding online gaming space.
Faunasphere goes Facebook
We've received word today from the team over at Faunasphere that they're taking their game over to the land of Facebook, to show the "social gamers" what a MMO really is. Faunsphere Facebook and Faunsphere.com will be linked together into one large world, letting users from both realms interact with one another. The game will continue to run on the same microtransaction system, where users can buy additional items for their fauna and commission scientific tests to know more about the hidden skills that lie in their favorite animals. All we can do now is pray that this style of game catches on in Facebook, so when we ask our friends if they play any MMOs, they don't respond with, "Oh, yeah, Farmville!" Then, we won't feel the need to throttle people.
The Fringe: The Dos and Don'ts of Facebook games
Welcome to The Fringe, where we totter on the edge of MMOs with a guide for playing Facebook games. When we asked on the Daily Grind if you played Facebook games, many of you said you did. But Facebook is very polarizing. Some people love the games, while others don't see them as games at all and hate everything having to do with them. It doesn't help that there's so much spam associated with most of the games. But those of us who do play know that there are a wide variety and that many of them include the same gameplay that our favorite MMOs have. We get XP, levels, acquire loot, make avatars, play minigames within the games, quest, trade items and even participate in PvP. The sim games are extremely popular and require quite a bit of strategy for proper allocation of resources. But if you don't like text adventure games or never got into games like old school SimCity, you're not going to get the Facebook versions either. If you do play these MMO-lite games, there are things you can do to get the most out of your play sessions. And there are things you shouldn't do so that you don't annoy your friends (as much) nor imbalance your life. Those of us who have spent time playing casual games of all kinds know that they can suck you in even more than full-blown MMOs. Most of us can't play WoW at work, but casual games with their low resource consumption and their easy access are tempting when work isn't keeping our full attention. This applies to games like solitaire, but add the comeraderie and variety of Facebook games and we can be even more tempted to play when we shouldn't. So here are some general Dos and Don'ts:
The Daily Grind: Do you play on Facebook?
Facebook is a haven for simple social games these days -- emphasis on simple. The gameplay frequently consists of nothing more than a few clicks and then waiting for the game to do what it wants to, a type of mechanic once memorably referred to as sandwich gameplay. (There's nothing interesting for the player to do, so you may as well get up and make yourself a sandwich.) And yet games of this breed can acquire more subscribers than World of Warcraft, which is one of those concepts that seems baffling at first, but once you think about it, it's still baffling. The games are certainly massive, multiplayer, and online. About the only thing we could argue they're not is games, since there's little to no skill involved at the best of times. But they certainly don't seem to have problem bringing in money or subscribers, and they're becoming omnipresent. Do you take part? Do you play one or two because your friends do, or several of them? Do you use them to eat up downtime in your game of choice, or do you play them on their own merits? Or do you dislike them precisely because they're barely-disguised treadmills?
.jpg.cf.jpg)
Facebook games manager is eyeing your grandma
And the rest of your family, for that matter. In a recent interview with VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi, program manager for games in Facebook's platform marketing division Gareth Davis had a lot to say about their burgeoning social network/"gaming platform." According to Davis, the network has accrued more than 5,000 games since opening up their platform in 2007 and those games are coming from small fish and enormous whales alike. Davis says the demographics for game players are changing as well, "Our fastest growing demographic now is over 30. Now it's grandparents playing games with grandchildren. You don't see that anywhere else." Hit the jump for more!
