Monday Night Musings: Social Networking Games
Apparently late last week a story came out over on TechCrunch about how EA has started the process to buy up the social networking site Rupture. While the deal is still in the works and has not been confirmed by EA themselves, the act alone raises some questions as to the possible implications of a big game company like EA buying up a social networking startup. It could be part of the growing trend of MySpace and Facebook to use message boards and widgets on their sites in a 'gaming' manner. While I tend not to use the widgets much myself, I have received numerous invites to play 'widget' games on facebook, such as Pirates vs. Ninjas, or Poke It!, and they even have Scrabulous on there, which is a rip-off of Scrabble. Many advertising companies, such as Google, are banking on the idea that social networking sites will be a great way to further profits with viral marketing and banner ads, which only fans the flame more.
However, a recent article in the Calgary Herald they quote some comScore statistics that show that: "the number of U.S. visitors on MySpace fell to 68 million in February from about 72 million in October, while the average time people spent on their Facebook profiles dropped to 161.3 minutes from 195.6 minutes. This indicates U.S. social networking is at the 'mature stage of the growth curve'." So social networking seems to be in a mature state, which might explain EA's desire to purchase the startup; however, at the same time it reads as if the social networking sites may also be in decline, if the trend for the past 4 months continues.
I can see the draw of the 'mini-games' present on these networking site, they require no more than a few seconds to play, but have a lifespan of several days, if not an eternity (which on the internet attention span is a rated as a few months). At the same time they allow you to interact with the people you have on the site as 'friends' (whether known to you in real life or not) and that promotes a type of social interaction; nevertheless, I find the whole system to be rather obnoxious and backwards in design, since it is constantly asking me to download another 'widget' in order to take part in a game, which just adds another item to the mountainous page of stuff I need to look at whenever I have time to log on. For those reasons alone, I feel I'm not the best candidate to declare how 'hot' the trend is, so that's why I am asking you guys how you feel about the Facebook/MySpace 'game' offerings and your experiences with them. Do you find them intriguing? do you play many, few, none of them? Do they, or other offerings, keep you returning to a social networking site?
I'm very interested to see what everyone has to say and at the same time am interested to see what EA does with Rupture... doesn't EA have a little game called Spore coming out soon... very interesting.
PixelPoet
Posted to Miscellany on 12 May 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: facebook, future, games, monday night musings, myspace
Digital Chocolate´s Tower Bloxx is great on Facebook. Used to play that alot for a short while.
Even more I liked Facebook-Pacman. But then Namco lawyers found out about it...:p
Facebook gaming works superb for challenging friends to compete for highscores. And since your full name (and profile) is on display rather than a three letter moniker (like most arcade-style high scores) you are more motivated to beat the crap out of your friends - in public.