November 15th, 2007
We’ve been reading with interest several articles and posts that are focused on weaving (to borrow Raph Koster’s words) the following five virtual world threads together: 1) social networks 2) user generation 3) open source/standards 4) 3D immersive 5) social gaming. In fact, as both The Guardian – with an article forcused on Facebook’s gaming evolution – and Wired noted with a fascinating article on how gaming has become pervasive in many aspects our lives, the game-related aspects of social networks and virtual worlds are becoming more and more evident & important.
As Koster notes:
“…it is in entertainment-driven worlds that … the mainstreaming is happening yet again, driven not just by the juggernaut of World of Warcraft, but also by casual gaming. Not just on the kids’ side, but on the general side of using casual games as advertising and marketing tools. And of course, stuff like the recently announced MySpace deal to allow users to embed casual games in their profiles, or the whole NFL virtual world thing, shows that once again, it will likely be entertainment that leads the pack.
…The bottom line is something that has been known for a very long time. Chat is never enough. Try to find a real-world business built on social interaction without something to do, and what you will find is that successful social (or “thirdâ€) places generally rely on a shared activity: drinks at the bar serving as a lubricant, bingo at the church, bowling at the lanes, a movie to ignore, and so on.”
And, as The Guardian puts it:
“Facebook is a game. A very social one. Sure, there’s no real endgame – unless you consider bringing all of your contacts together into one giant database the ultimate win – but the goals are to win friends and influence people. The techniques you use to do this are to manipulate and to project your identity via role playing (profile development, reputation building, zombies) and minigames (the plethora apps, from Where Have You Been? to Am I Green? which really are just loosely veiled personality tests).
There are more than a couple of things that make Facebook different from the commercial games on the market, but here are three of particular interest: first, it’s got an awfully large user-base, larger than any computer game has ever seen. Second, the gender demographics for the age of users is astoundingly even (those 50/50 stats bandied around by gamers really only apply to the younger age groups, I’m afraid). Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is a platform through which other people can make and distribute Facebook games, some of which integrate existing gaming platforms into the technology. This last is a realistic step games could make to solve the above two differences…”
Finally, as the Wired essay so adroitly stated we’re in a new era where reality feels like we’re playing a game:
“…From the military’s use of America’s Army for recruiting to quarterbacks researching tactics via Madden NFL, we’ve gone from games representing life to becoming life. Ask yourself: Do you believe that your club moves have improved from playing Dance Dance Revolution? Have your driving skills matured because of Gran Turismo? Does cleaning out your RSS reader remind you of playing Pac-Man? Does the action of the iPhone’s bouncing icons recall Mario Bros.? Have you tried to convince your friends that the invasion of Sudoku and Tetris into your dreams is proof of high-level brain activity? Welcome to the arcade called you.
Of course, the basics of gameplay — competing against opponents, setting records, winning prizes — are as old as human civilization. But the gaming mindset has now become pervasive. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions, to find creative solutions. For many, life itself has turned into a game. Our online lives are just twists on the videogame leaderboards, where we jockey to get our blog a higher rank on Technorati and compete to acquire more friend-adds on MySpace than the next guy.
Even on more serious social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, you rack up friends, accrue hipster points, try to score high on identity tests. At iminlikewithyou.com — a dating site with bidding, competition, winners, and losers — you pose questions (or “games,” in the parlance of the service) for potential mates to bid on, and the resulting interactions are less stilted and artificial than conventional online dating services. That’s right, a gamelike environment feels more real than trying to mimic the experience of real-world dating.
…How did we end up with a world we play like a game? It’s no historical coincidence that gaming ascended right along with the rise of the information age. As the ever-rising flood of new data threatened to inundate our lives, we developed tools to organize all that information — sort it, filter it, cut it, mix it. Desktop editing apps let us manage our data, but they also let us manipulate it. As we got better at controlling pixels and bits, games became a handy metaphor. And more than a metaphor. Like a Sim city come to life, we’ve moved from a society that creates goods to one that solves puzzles.”
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
