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The Soapbox: What MMOs could learn from social gaming
I mentioned a couple of months ago that social gaming isn't going to destroy MMOs. That's good news for everyone other than Richard Garriott and Zynga stockholders. But I think taking this as a sign that we can ignore social gaming for now and forever as an aberration would be... a mistake, to put it lightly. See, there are things that social games do even better than MMOs tend to. And the hint is right there in the name. No, I'm not implying that these are better games; I'm saying that social games are generally much better about handling the social side of the equation. And the MMO industry as a whole would do well to pick up on the hints. Not everything, of course. We all have recurring nightmares about that one person on Facebook whose timeline is nothing but a series of dubious achievements in social games. But there are a lot of elements scattered throughout the games as a whole that could be oddly useful if taken as a whole.
