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8 Types of Social Game

Posted by Tadhg | Mar 20, 2009 | Filed under Personal, Research, Simple Lifeforms, Social Games

This article describes 8 kinds of social game operating today (mostly on Facebook) and provides many examples. We hope it does a better job of explaining what is going on in social games and why we’re so very excited by social games in general.

Social games as an industry is about the conversation. We realised recently that the  conversation about social games is still waiting to be had but it can’t be forced. Social games are still very unfamiliar terrain to most, and so this article is all about grounding that conversation so that it can begin.

We hope you find it useful.

Social RPGs

Social RPGs borrow a lot from regular video game RPGs (role playing games). There are quite a few of these kinds of games and they all follow more-or-less the same formula: Players collect money to buy items by performing ‘Jobs’ or ‘Quests’, assign bought items to members of their team or party, and do so in the confines of an energy statistic that prevents the player from doing too much too soon.

Zynga (the most successful social game developer on Facebook according to AppData) has a suite of RPGs which are built from a template they have developed. The games are the same but use different images and logos. Other RPG makers use very similar formulae. Mobsters, Mafia Wars, Mob Wars and other hoodlum-based games are the most popular of the social RPGs. Some others like Vampire Wars, Street Racing, World War and Fashion Wars also do pretty well. Dungeons and Dragons: Tiny Adventures was also an attempt to bring some old-school tabletop role playing to Facebook but has apparently ceased development. Other notables include Battle Stations, Knighthood and Might of Many.

Sports  RPG

Sport RPG games do not generally feature in the top 50 applications, but some of them are interesting games with a decent-sized audience. They are very similar to social RPGs in many respects, but the focus tends to be more competition-oriented. Sports RPGs are often reminiscent of Football Manager, Fantasy Football and so forth, with the added feature of using your friends as players in your team. One example of this is Premier Football, a game in which you manage a team of players made up of your friends.

One Sports RPG that stands out is Tennis Mania. Tennis Mania uses many of the same management mechanics of other sports RPGs and mixes them with an actual tennis game. It is, as far as we know, unique in doing so and remains one of the most interesting sports RPG games on Facebook.

Casual games

UK social developer Playfish has made quite a strong play for casual games in social networks. Unlike most other social game developers, Playfish uses Flash heavily and has a very high standard of graphics and sound compared to every other developer. Some of their games have clearly drawn their inspiration from the success stories of the Nintendo DS and Wii, with Who Has the Biggest Brain? clearly belonging to the Brain Training school of thought, and Bowling Buddies, Geo Challenge and Minigolf Party very reminiscent of the sorts of games you’d see on Wii.

Another approach is the casual portal, such as MindJolt Games, which is an application that acts as a portal to over 500 casual games (mostly simple ones). This is a good strategy given Facebook’s inherent limitations on numbers of bookmarks that users can have. Other games portal services such as Kongregate have also created a presence on social networks, although this tends to amount to a redirecting index back to the portal service, which may explain why they haven’t really taken off to any extent.

Word Games

Word games are best viewed as a special subset of casual games because they tend to attract a particular kind of player who often shows no interest in other casual games and vice versa. The first (and in some cases only) social game that most people have ever heard of was Scrabulous (now defunct), but there are several other word games that have arisen in its place.

Playfish’s Word Challenge is the most popular at the moment and also the best. It comprises several game modes. In the basic one you are given a set of letters and must find as many words from those letters in a set period of time, with a visual table on-screen giving you a means to deduce missing words. Being social, the game also shows you your performance against other friends who have played the game.

Other notable word games include Scramble (a Zynga game in which you make words out of letter patterns), Word Twist (similar to Word Challenge, but more of a versus-game) PathWords and a couple of official Scrabble games (Scrabble seems to have complicated licensing arrangements, which have resulted in different versions for different geographical reasons). Lastly, the original inventors of Scrabulous came back with a different game called Wordscraper which allows a customisable kind of Scrabble game rather than the official version.

Virtual Villages

A number of social games operate on the ideas of creating a presence in a defined area, giving gifts to your friends and essentially hanging out. They are among the most popular social games and function purely on their social interaction mixed with a creative mentality. They tend to form communities as a result, whether explicitly represented by the game, or implicitly in the form of a club or association.

First is Lil Green Patch. The idea behind Lil Green Patch (and its sister application Lil Blue Cove) is that the player has a garden in which they plant flowers. They give plants to each other and the application promises that the gifting of plants to others helps save actual rainforest in the real world. Players tend their gardens, de-weeding and looking after them. Another application in the same vein is myFarm.

Pet Society is another. In this game, the player has a Pet. They can take care of it, seeing to its needs, dressing it, petting it etc. They can take their pet out into town and meet other pets, arranged in a kind of village structure. There’s a whole community, the opportunity to visit other players pet homes, and generally interact. Pet Society is a Playfish game and as such is very animated and vivid.

Yoville also follows the little town structure motif, but instead of pets the player has a personal avatar. Yoville is essentially a combination isometric town and chat application. You can kit your character and your apartment with various nice objects, there are specially collectible objects and coins which can be earned or bought, and you can meet many other players in the game and talk to them and otherwise just generally hang out.

Perhaps the most geeky virtual village game is My City. This SimCity style game allows players to create their own functioning city and invite their friends to contribute to it.  My City is also unusual as a social game in that it uses Microsoft’s Silverlight as a viewer rather than Adobe’s Flash.

Casino

The main difference between social network Poker and sites such as 888.com is that they are for-points games rather than gambling games played for real money. The most popular social Poker game is Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s a competent if visually unexciting version of the game in which players can buy or earn chips. The game is very good at making it easy for you to jump in and out of a hand as required and also features virtual gifts, which you can buy with your excess game chips if you have any.

Zynga’s game is the most popular of all the games on Facebook at the moment. However Playdom (who claim to be the number one social game developer on Myspace) recently announced that they are making a move into Facebook by taking over the popular Poker Palace game. This will likely see a lot of competition between the two games and Playdom bring with them a sizeable war chest of investment.

For those who have no interest in Poker, there’s always Blackjack.

Just for Laughs

In the early days of Facebook Platform the first applications that really broke out of the gate were just-for-laughs games. These sorts of games are essentially a virtual joke that invites users to get their friends in for a few goes before they move on. Just-for-laughs games tend to rise and fall quickly in popularity. In the first few months every Facebook user was swamped with messages such as “you have just been bitten” by games like Vampires vs Werewolves. Users actually became quite annoyed at the level of noisy traffic that these games generated to the point that Facebook stepped in and clamped down on them.

Today the just for laughs games still exist and thrive but they are not as annoying as they once were. A good example is the game KickMania. The game is simple enough: You choose to place one of your friends’ photos on the head of a dummy model, which you then proceed to kick as hard as you can and score some points. Your friend then receives a message that they have been kicked.

Kidnap is an evolution of the just for laughs game. It uses a combination of light RPG with a social mechanic which involves essentially ‘kidnapping’ your friends and showing them different cities around the world. The game is a promotional vehicle for the Travel Channel and has been very successful to date, building a loyal fan base.

Compare People (and a variety of similar friend rating games) would also count as a just for laughs game. The game invites you to complete questions about which of your friends is smartest, funniest, sexiest and so on. Your friends then get notified that they have been compared and either found strong or wanting. This game and similar ones of its type are really just a social giggle. Other examples are is cool, Water Gun Fight and Pillow Fight.

Ownership Games

An ownership game is one in which players establish ownership over each other in complicated networks, and gift and otherwise generally look after their new-found charges. Ownership games have their origin in the just for laughs style of game but tend to establish longer terms of ownership and build much more resilient communities as a result. These communities are examples of social networking and gaming behaving synonymously.

The most popular and well known of these games is Friends For Sale. Friends for Sale allows you to buy your friends, treat them well, give them gifts, make them do amusing things and other light-hearted activities. There’s an element of gamesmanship in it in that the objective of the game is to profit on the buying and selling of your friends.

Slightly more on the fringe is another game called Human Pets. Like Friends For Sale, the goal is to establish patterns of ownership with your friends and make new friends, but unlike Friends For Sale the gifting system is creative. Players upload their own pictures, add tag lines to them, create their own little shops and so on. This feature got Human Pets into some trouble with Facebook (and prompted an off-platform move to its own dotcom destination site) because the game attracted a much more adult audience than Friends For Sale as a result, beyond the point of risqué and into erotica.

Ownership games are on some level essentially dating games. The compulsion behind them is popularity to an extent, but they’re more about meeting people and creating social structures as a game itself. They are in many ways quite fringe compared to what most people regard as gaming, but their appearance and has made social games undeniably more interesting in many ways.

Conclusion

Some of these categories are heavily over-subscribed, especially the RPG, and it would be difficult to achieve any traction with a new RPG without a serious advertising push. As Facebook itself grows rapidly cannibalisation probably isn’t a major issue for the RPG just yet, but it likely will be.

Highly casual games (including word games) have questions over them as regards their economics. Users love them (Playfish’s games are among the stickiest on Facebook) but they are difficult to monetise indirectly. If you’re giving a casual game away for free, what incentive is there for players to pay? Virtual property in a game like this is meaningless, advertising tends to be irrelevant to the game content (and thus ignored), and the only sort of investment that players have in them are high score sharing and other viral activities, which are socially uninteresting. Playfish are trying to monetise their casual games with a traditional upgrade model (get the first levels free, pay for the pro version). This has always been a difficult business model for users to accept because there are so many other free games available.

Some categories are under-subscribed, such as Casino, Sports RPG and Ownership games. While each has established one or two major proponents, this really does not exclude others from making a go of it. The history of games markets has always been one of newcomers and surprise challengers, so it would be premature to regard any of them as locked up and untouchable. The low barriers to entry of social game especially make this likely. Of course, some categories do not yet exist. Nobody’s thought of them or nobody’s done a good enough job executing on one of them yet to make any impact. We at Simple Lifeforms like to think that our forthcoming game (Spell Souls) is just such a game. Stay tuned.

While it’s an exciting time to be a social game developer, the scene has developed such that the initial rush is now over and now is the time for more focused strategies, better targeted games and a drive to improve quality. Social games have crossed the threshold into a properly-developing sector of the games industry now, and it’s a great time to get into it. This is not a complete list of games or game types. It is, like all such articles, open to questions of whether a particular games really belongs in one category or another, whether categories run the risk of shoe-horning content and whether it is a good idea to categorise games in genres in the first place. However it is useful to be able to explain social games in an imperfect context than no context at all. That’s how the conversation starts.

Thanks are due to AppData.com for providing useful data for all of the example games in this article.

You can follow many of my more instant thoughts @tadhgk on Twitter.