Courtesy of Flickr's LivingOS

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we try to provide a steady stream of insightful information about the business side of social games. In our last post, we started to examine understanding micro-transactions and virtual goods. In particular, we focused on how game design could motivate players to interact with these features. So in today’s post, I thought it would be valuable to offer my perspective (as a newbie gamer) to playing social games and the different features that appealed to me. Why? I think it’s something that game designers, businesses and hopefully others (new Facebook gamers) can appreciate: a fresh look into what makes games “fun” to play. What are certain game design features that (even new) players can feel excited about? Here’s my list of Facebook games that I found interesting to play, let me know what you think.

Need For Speed Nitro

Although I’m not a big fan of racing games, this popular car racing game is really fun to play. If you like collecting, sharing, and racing cars and want to challenge your friends to races, this game is a must-try.  Admittedly, I do have a competitive spirit and love winning my races, so I like the option (feature) of being able to select the cities and race courses (that I want to use in the races). It’s probably all just part of engaging game mechanics (I’ve been doing a lot of research on this topic lately), but I feel like each course offers me a unique advantage for my experience level and my car’s abilities. It seems to me (not sure if this has any validity), as if I’m more successful at winning my races on the Rio course, as opposed to the ones in Madrid. Nevertheless, having that feature option is really nice. What really got me hooked though was the free customization feature in the game (kind of like Pimp My Ride, but a do-it-yourself version).  For me, designing my car is comparable to the experience of getting dressed every morning. It’s my way to express myself and add my personal stamp on something, to show-off a part of my personality. Secretly, I like the fact that my hot pink 1960 Volkswagen Westphalia might grab some attention.

Pet Pupz

In Pet Pupz, taking care of your puppy (the purpose of the game) feels like you are really nurturing a real-life animal. I feel like I have to visit my puppy every day and take care of it: it’s the ultimate responsibility for me, and it’s only available in this virtual setting. As far as specific features go, I really like the fact that I can take care of my friend’s puppy as well as mine. I feel like I am extending a helpful hand, showing that I care about her when I do that. It’s a nice social gesture and I feel as if through this process, I am actually strengthening my real-life relationships. Another feature that I really like in the game is the Scene Builder, because it allows me to (like in the previous game), customize and build my own product. As the name suggests, you can build a customized photo or scene and place your puppy in it. The reason I like the feature (and I feel that it’s worth my time investment) is because I can show it off to people when the product is finished (you can download the scene, print it out or post it to your wall). Bragging never hurt anybody…

Mob Wars

Mob Wars is interesting to me, because it’s a role playing game that I actually didn’t think it’d enjoy playing… that is until I started advancing in the game.  The fact that you can recruit your friends and therefore finish jobs quicker or level up faster made me feel like I really accomplished something and there was a real incentive for me to keep going on. I even thought that I could possibly start an all-girl mob (I’m not sure why I would’ve wanted to do that, but I did) however after realizing that I needed all the help I could get, I abandoned that idea. I also really like seeing my progress in the game, being able to buy my weapons (guns and crowbars) and seeing how it helps me to complete jobs etc.

I realize that this list is only a start. There are many other games that could be engaging to try and I promise to do it in time. In the meantime, if you have any recommendations, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us.

Courtesy of Flickr's tao zhyn

To start, thanks so much for joining our Facebook Page and contributing your thoughts and comments to our blog discussions – we really appreciate it! Since your feedback helps us craft this blog series, we wanted to address a particular topic that there has been a lot of buzz around: understanding micro-transactions (the sale of virtual goods) in social games. You might (or not) be surprised to learn that just like understanding how game design and game mechanics can help motivate and engage people in gameplay, the same principles can be applied to understanding why people buy virtual goods in the first place. This is important as virtual goods revenues are expected to hit almost $2 billion in the U.S alone this year.

While we’re planning to address the more complex issues surrounding the monetary ecosystem of social games in future posts, we thought we’d start here: How can game design and game mechanics create demand for virtual goods, essentially leading to player purchases?

Why Virtual Goods Matter

Virtual goods are digital items with contextual meaning. They are non-physical objects like avatars, bling or coins that are purchased for use in online games or communities. These objects are nothing more than icons or pixels, so why do we spend real cash on obtaining them? As we’ve explained before, games and play are basic survival adaptation and so are the way we perceive virtual goods. What the end user perceives as a virtual good is always part of a user experience–the gameplay–and it is usually delivered by the game design. From a game design (and business) point of view, it’s beneficial to understand this. Virtual goods hold meaning to the player, because they enable players to perform meaningful tasks within a game, like influencing game statistics or allowing for self-expression. They become metaphors for packaging up behaviours that people are already engaging in, offering real value.

Implications for Game Design

If it’s not about the virtual goods themselves, but it’s about the underlying human emotion or desire that is displayed by them that really matters (as some would argue it does) then we can see its significance for game design. Game designers can essentially create an environment that incorporates engaging ways to display, obtain and share these virtual goods. Researcher Vili Lehdonvirta suggests a few ways game designers can achieve this level of engagement. He explains that game designers can try to mimic conditions that are similar to environments that existed in our hunter-gatherer days, so to drive players to make virtual goods purchases. (We’ll see in future posts why this is important to understanding micro-transactions.) He suggests placing items in a game that provide functional attributes that players can relate to, like adding an element of performance advantage or new functionality. as he explains, other than just having desirable attributes, functional commodities also have a strong emotional and social meaning. As an example, in Need for Speed Nitro on Facebook, performance upgrades for cars generally have to be earned through gameplay instead of cash purchases, but cash purchases (sale of virtual goods) can help to reach these gameplay goals faster. What other features influence users’ purchase decisions? He suggests designing goods that can be customized or personalized, as this adds an element of social hierarchy for the player. Scarcity is another way game designers can create demand. Humans are hardwired to compete for scarce resources, so by making digital goods artificially scarce, designers are raising their perceived value.

As you can see, using game mechanics that make virtual goods seem more valuable and meaningful, we can incentivize players to action. We should note that we’ve hardly scratched the surface of this complex topic. There are many elements to building successful monetary ecosystems and how each one relates to gameplay. However, we felt that for game designers (or businesses) understanding how game design can create demand for virtual goods was an interesting implication to consider. What are your thoughts? Leave us a comment or contact us.

Courtesy of Flickr's ericgjerde

As we promised, here is our second installment of our Q&A blog post  with an Ayogo team member. This time we’re featuring Paul Prescod to give us his insight about our industry. Paul is a rock star in the land of start-ups, the computer sciences and technological innovation. (He is too modest to approve of the preceding  sentence.) Paul is one of the founders and the Chief Technology Officer of Ayogo Games. Prior to Ayogo, he was Director of Application Development at Kinzin, a social network for families. Paul is well-known for the following: as the popularizer of the “REST” approach to web service design, acting as a long-time contributor to the Python programming language interpreter, and contributing to the original XML specification. Oh yes, he also co-authored (with Charles Goldfarb) one of the most popular books on XML, “The XML Handbook.”

1. What excited you about social games and why did you see an opportunity in this field?

In 2007, Michael and I lead the team that launched a fun little Facebook application called Are You Normal. We were astonished at how quickly it grew, accumulating tens of thousands of users per day. That alerted us to the potential of social networks for rapid growth. The problem was that we had built Are You Normal as an experiment in virality, and hadn’t baked in a monetization model. It was a promo for a social network rather than directly monetizing itself. When Michael and I decided to start our own company, we wanted to build something with less friction: we wanted to build hugely popular apps that would make money directly. As the business has evolved, it turns out that we still do both kinds of apps. Some are directly monetized like our City of Ash for iPhone and Hockey Pool Pro. Other games market products like Need for Speed Nitro for Facebook. In that case, it was a huge opportunity to work with a major brand. And a third category has emerged. We’re also doing educational games which help people to improve their lives, and that provides yet another form of compensation.

2. How has your professional background helped you in your role as CTO of Ayogo?

I’ve had quite a varied career. The two major phases were my work with enterprises and my work in social media.

Developing software for enterprises like Cisco, EMC and Daimler Chrysler, I learned about scalability and the software development lifecycle. Issue triage, release planning, development methodologies etc. We work very hard to make reusable software modules that allow us to assemble social and mobile games quickly, and port them between platforms (social networks, websites, smartphone devices) easily.

Building a social network at Kinzin, I learned a lot about how social media is changing lives and habits. Historically, everything was communicated socially from friend to friend. Then there was the “mass media” phase where media powers had incredible power in determining what is cool or interesting. Now we live in a hybrid world where they still have huge megaphones, but everyone else has a little megaphone too. Everyone who uses Facebook is a micro-publisher. Hundreds of millions of people are publishers now. So in the old days, you had to find a way to make a deal with some kind of media or distribution channel. Now you just need to make something compelling and get a critical mass of users to try it. Building Kinzin also gave me quite a bit of insight into the convection of messages, users and notifications through a social network. As Facebook has broadened its focus beyond college students, we’ve seen them re-invent some features similar to those we had in Kinzin.

3. What is the focus of Ayogo’s technical team?

Within the technology group, our focus is on acceleration. We always want the second time we implement any particular game feature easier than the first, and the third time it should be virtually free. We hate re-inventing wheels or cutting and pasting code, instead of reusing software components. We are also responsible for making sure that things scale up smoothly from hundreds through hundreds of thousands of users. Acceleration is different than velocity. The first time we do something, we are not necessarily faster than anyone else. It’s when we take that component and reuse it that we see the benefit. Many companies in this space just slap junk together and the second game takes as long to build as the first. We’re a small company, so everyone on the development team ends up contributing to game design. We all have our favorite social games (and board games, console games, etc.) and try to extract the underlying psychological principles so that we can apply them in our own games.

4. Tell us about some innovative software platforms that Ayogo has developed (will develop?)

Ayogo has a lot of cool technologies that we hope to one day describe on the technology blog. We call the complete set “the Ayogo Framework.” Individual parts have more interesting names like CashCache (for currency management), the Shed (for item ownership), Job Board (for incentivized user actions), PhoneKit (for portable mobile user interfaces) and UserSpace (for profile management). Admittedly, a couple of those names are terrible computer geek puns. All together, these technologies allow us to assemble social games from parts, like a Mechano set, and port them between social networks or smartphone platforms.

5. Which games do you play and why?

I go through spurts of addiction to Facebook and iPhone poker games. Poker’s thrills are well-documented and playing it in Facebook keeps the stakes low and the game casual. I am looking forward to Sid Meier’s Civilization Network Facebook game. Civilization games have been a weakness of mine for more than a decade now. Last year I lost a couple of weeks of my life with Civilization for iPhone. When you combine dopamine-producing platforms like the iPhone and Facebook with the carefully constructed Skinner Box of the Civilization game model…the potential is frightening.

On console, I actually love Need for Speed NITRO quite apart from our business interest in it. I usually do not like racing games, but they did a great job making that one fun for casual race-gamers. I also love Rock Band and Guitar Hero. I do most of my console gaming in front of my kids so that excludes many of the most interesting console games. My daughter likes to watch me play Super Monkey Ball though. When she was two, she noticed that I had it on my iPhone and the Wii. One day when she was two, she pointed to the MacBook: “Got Super Monkey Ball on that?” I’ll have to talk to Sega about that.

Thanks Paul! We’ll continue the Q&A series next week…until then, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us. Better yet, why not join our Facebook Page? Also, make sure to check back to read more about Paul’s insights about the industry on this blog and our technology blog.

Courtesy of Flickr's janusz l

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “social games with a purpose,” since I went to a gaming event last month in Vancouver. That’s where the idea of was first introduced to me, and I thought it’d be interesting to explore this topic further. Why? Because games are typically seen as entertainment, however it seems they can they also be used as tools for changing behaviours, learning new skills and even saving the planet.

Games With A Purpose

What does it mean when we call something a game with a purpose and how is it different from just a game? A game with a purpose is defined as a game played on the computer in an entertaining setting that serves some purpose for the person setting up the game. The player usually does something that she would otherwise not willingly do just because she can do it. The idea is that when you’re playing these games it’s not just about having fun, but it’s also about doing something in the game that has meaning in a real-world context. An early example of a game with a purpose or GWAP, is the ESP game. In that game, players had to identify images and label them because image recognition was something computers couldn’t do back then. The game made humans willingly perform a task that they otherwise might not have wanted to do (identify images) because it was part of a game.

Tools for Change

As we’ve explained in previous posts, when we enjoy learning, we retain more because we’re more engaged in something that is meaningful. From a scientific perspective, the goal of game developers is for players to achieve a deep state of focused motivation or something called Flow (the term was coined by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Why? This is where players get “hooked” in the game. It’s also believed that this element of Flow is what makes games such a great candidate for changing behaviours.

So what kinds of Facebook games are we talking about? Some more common casual games with purpose have been used in science-related fields. Researchers at the Children’s Nutrition Centre of Baylor College of Medicine created a successful PC game that helped kids improve their lifestyle. (They used the game as a mechanism for kids to discover and distinguish between fresh fruits and vegetables, and junk foods that just had fruits in them.) The game utilized “fun” and interactive gameplay to motivate the kids to make the right choices. For us, we’re currently working on a motivational and educational Facebook game about how to improve eating and exercise habits. The purpose of the game is to teach players how to estimate the nutritional value of foods in order for them to make the right choices. The game will also encourage players to make concrete positive changes to their nutrition and fitness and activity regimes. (Through a series small actions, completing “missions” and using achievements as a way to encourage particular player behaviour, we hope to encourage actions within the game, which indirectly improves health.)

Besides games that encourage learning skills, there are also Facebook games that use gameplay to address “unsolved” social issues in the real-world, like poverty, education, health and climate change. Lil’Green Patch is one of those games that combines environmentalism and gaming. The more actions that players complete in the game (tend to their and their friends’ land), the better the outcome for a real-world problem (advertisers will donate money to saving the rain forest). Who would’ve thought that nurturing patches of virtual land on Facebook could raise more than $320,000? What are your thoughts about using social games to motivate us to positive action? Leave us a comment or contact us.

I came across an article by Scott Austin, a blogger for the Wall Street Journal. I thought it’d be valuable to address it, since it explores a Facebook specific phenomenon taking place against social games– he cites an apparent “backlash” brewing against them. To paraphrase Mr. Austin, social games do utilize the messaging capabilities of Facebook to communicate with their players, help their players communicate with each other, and to help (perhaps most importantly from a viral growth point of view) recruit their friends to the games they are playing. (Currently, other than word-of-mouth recommendations, 57% of social gamers rely on in-game alerts from friends for recommendations.) So in essence, what Mr. Austin is saying is that the backlash is against the overuse of these messaging channels sending them information they don’t care about.

Courtesy of Flickr's derpunk

SPAM: Not The Canned Variety

Virality is key to driving user growth and user retention on Facebook so, in a “tragedy of the commons” sort of way, the incentive to overuse these channels is very high. So how can social games and Facebook remedy this situation? While the most recent statistical information about gameplay on social platforms like Facebook would suggest that social game developers can relax about an industry crippling backlash, social game developers might want to listen to the cries of this large group of disgruntled Facebook users. (The group titled “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish or your park, or your mafia!! has more than 5.5 million fans.)

Retention With Facebook Game Dashboard

Social games have fed on Facebook’s user acquisition machine, openness and general viral features. Like any other business, games that rely on viral growth for their business model need to find a way to grow without upsetting potential customers. Although Scott doesn’t address this is his post directly, we’ve talked about the Facebook Dash Board as an opportunity to increase the signal to noise ratio. As we explained, the most valuable communications channels on Facebook are active (like the wall, or the personal message system) and not passive. Passive channels are invariably overwhelmed with noise, just as this notifications feature was overwhelmed. Fast-forward to the dashboard: notifications are grouped and limited by application, so no application can overpower another through sheer volume. One result is that application developers will now need to consider whether they want more applications to support more message “channels” or “topics” to users.  If not active messaging, what actions might you take to ensure users come back to your application? Some suggest creatively utilizing the other capabilities that Facebook makes available to game developers, such as introducing the collection of emails when a player installs the application, encouraging them to bookmark the game, creating a fan page that has updates and posting counter updates. These actions will help notify users and easily re-engage the players with your game, without annoying non-players. Posting news items is also an option, as there’s a chance they will be visible under the recently used applications area of the Dashboard.

PS: The rival fan page titled, “I care about your farm, fish, park & your mafia! Those who don’t R Haters!” now has more than 600 fans. Instead of joining either group, why not email us or leave us comment instead?

Courtesy of Flickr's John Bristowe

The last few weeks have been filled with a lot of excitement in Vancouver and also around the office. As you all know, a little thing called the Olympics is taking place, so the vibe is extra positive in the city. (One of the major Olympic venues, Canada Hockey Place, is just outside our office, so you can imagine how busy it is.) As for us, our non-Olympics related news include the following: We’re almost ready to announce a new game that we are working on. I can’t give too much away, but it’s a social game that aims to inspire and create change. Make sure to stay tuned for updates about how that rolls out.

What else? Ayogo got some serious link love on Friday from Social Times‘ Neil Vidyarth. Neil contacted us after hearing about some of the games we have worked on. He thought it’d be valuable to interview Michael about the Vancouver social gaming scene. Thanks Neil! I’ve cross-posted the interview below. As always, we’d love to hear from you, so make sure to leave a comment or email us if you have any questions.

PS: Michael is a guest contributor to Techvibes.com. His posts appear on Mondays, so be sure to check it out.

“Ayogo Games are an independent social games shop from Vancouver, Canada.  They’ve worked on some high profile titles like Mob Wars [actually, we worked with the developers of Mob Wars, cross porting their games to iPhone -- MJF], and have some interesting insights into the social games community.  I sat down with CEO Michael Fergusson to discuss the social games environment, monetization and the Vancouver social gaming scene.

ST: For those who haven’t heard of Ayogo, please give us a short introduction to your services?

MF: Ayogo develops casual social games that are distributed on social networks (like Facebook) and smartphones (like iPhone). We collaborate with content creators and rights holders to create games that will open new sources of revenue around their content. We’ve collaborated with a wide variety of organizations from Electronic Arts to Harvard Medical School, but our sweet spot is in the entertainment space: Video Games, TV and Movies.

ST: What got you into Facebook and iPhone application development?

MF: The opportunity to be part of the creation of something brand new. New business models, new technologies, new game genres. As an entrepreneur, what you want is to be there at the beginning, helping define what’s next.

ST: Have you had success with monetization of applications on either platform?

MF: Yes – we’ve had very good ARPU on both Facebook and iPhone for our games. Some of our games are not explicitly about monetization, but about incenting different types of behavior on the part of our players, and we’ve had good success in those games as well.

ST: How important is virtual currency in your games?

MF: Crucial, although it’s not always obvious to the player. We construct our games as economies, using the forces of supply and demand to drive activity.

ST: What has been your biggest success so far?

MF: We’ve had several projects that have done great things. Our work for EA has got the most favorable reviews from players, which is always very satisfying, and was great in terms of ROI. We did a project for a client in the film industry early in 2009 which added hundreds of thousands of users in a very short time, and generated millions of “incentivised actions”. Of course, we think the best is yet to come – we have some projects in the hopper right now which we’re very excited about.

ST: What has been the biggest surprise?

MF: How rapidly the casual game space is evolving. The confluence of so many different factors, social, technical and otherwise in such a short time. As a market matures, you expect it to slow down…

ST: Ayogo.com states that you help brands bring “fun” to their applications ? Is your model to develop applications for brands or do you have your own projects?

MF: Both, really. Our partners gain the benefit of our experimentation with our own projects. We’re willing to take greater technical and gameplay risks in our experimental projects than our partners are, typically. Some proof that a particular innovation works goes a long way to convincing them to include it in the projects we work on together.

ST: How did the company get started?

MF: My partner, Paul Prescod, and I were fascinated by the collision of social networking and micropayment-based games. We started working on our business plan in early 2008, and launched the company at the beginning of 2009. We’ve been very fortunate to attract some very senior partners into the business since then – the timing just worked out well. Dave Orchard, we snagged from BEA – he spent the last decade crafting the main web services standards we use every day; Dave Bezahler had been the owner of the key game and consumer brand accounts at WPP/Blast Radius. So our little startup started life with some real firepower. It helped that we worked out of the office next door to SuperRewards for the first six months, too. That was a very useful experience.

ST: Are there other social gaming companies in Vancouver? Do you interact with them?

MF: Sure – there are lots of cool companies doing great things. DimeRocker, PugPharm, Compass Engine, plus a lot of great work being done in the mobile space. Wavefront Accelerator has some great services that are keeping Vancouver at the cutting edge. It’s a lot of fun to be part of such a vibrant community.

ST: You write a lot about game design. Please give us some examples of games on Facebook that have engaging, innovative game designs.

Need For Speed -Nitro’s (ours) opponent selection that identifies friends and potential opponents for you
Backstage (Scractchnwin) has a great prize tree

ST: What is your relationship with BaddaMedia?

MF: Speaking of partners that have high-quality content. We’re collaborating with BaddaMedia to adapt their casino-based games to social networks.”

Courtesy of Flickr's clg20171

To recap the last few weeks, we have posted articles about the psychology behind gameplay, and how using engaging game mechanics can motivate people to play your games. Thanks for all you comments and follows on Twitter, we appreciate it!

One of the reasons we started this series was because we think that whether you are making games, funding the process or just playing them, games are a meaningful part of our everyday lives. So, let’s continue on…we think this next concept of “hot hands” is really fascinating and says something interesting about the relationship between play behaviour and evolutionary adaption.

Perceptions of Randomness

Some studies have found that when it comes to events that have randomness in them, like most games, rather than seeing them as such, people will impose patterns on the events by default. Why? According to evolutionary psychology, humans have an uncanny ability at predicting under conditions that are similar to environments that existed in our hunter-gatherer days, millions of years ago. The idea is that objects and events that ensured survival–natural resources like berries or hiding places–were clustered. Randomness was the exception. The conclusion? Our brains evolved to see patterns in most events even if there were none present.

Hot Hand Phenomenon

The hot hand phenomenon derives from this evolutionary kink that I described above, (our tendency to perceive patterns) and how this innate mechanism can be fooled in artificial environments. Hot hand refers to the expectation of “streaks” in sequences of hits and misses (when a person succeeds at something once, they’re more likely to do it again).

This concept was first presented in the journal of Cognitive Psychology in 1985. A few researchers, Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky used this research as evidence against a belief they noticed in basketball fans. The fans believed that a player had a better chance of making a basket after having made shots than after missing shots–hence the term “hot hands.” The problem? This was in fact, not true.

Implications for Game Design

So what does this have to do with social games and game design? Based on some recent studies, it was proven that “hot hands” existed even in contemporary events and artificial environments. For example, lotto games, stock markets, basketball games etc., and that this phenomenon was triggered when there were implied patterns associated with the events. As an example, we built a lottery game (a game of pure chance) and noticed how in the forums, the players were describing their “strategy” of predicting winning combinations to other players. In fact, their success could not have been influenced by strategy. For a game designer, (or a business) knowing the human brain’s tendency to see patterns is not a bad thing. You can build these implied patterns of uncertainty and chance to influence the meaning and the intensity of games.

PS. Some have suggested that the hot hand fallacy only applies to statistically independent probabilities, which might not apply to most games. It’d be great to recreate the 1985 study using data from popular Facebook games. Until then, what are your thoughts about hot hands? Contact us or leave a comment.

Courtesy of Flickr's Unhindered by Talent

As you probably heard, Google Buzz’s release was less than smooth. If it has sufficient motivation, Google has the capability to make Buzz succeed over the long run, despite the inauspicious start. If they do make it popular as a service, will it also be a good platform for social gaming? Based on our experience with Facebook, Twitter and smart phones, I have some suggestions for Google on how to make Buzz a great social gaming platform.

The general thrust of my suggestions is that Google Buzz should aim to be more like Facebook’s feeds and walls and less like Twitter. Although Twitter has been used in games, and should be a tool in every game developer’s toolbox, it is just not as central for a social game developer as Facebook is. In the sections below I’ll describe why this is.

Understanding Gaming Platforms

In any social network, the two features that interest us most are friend lists and feeds. The friend list allows us to make games that take advantage of real-world relationships. The feeds allow us to communicate with the user’s friends and followers.

Friend Lists

The main thing that social game developers need from friend lists is that it be game-relevant. What does that mean? The key is that the people on the friends list should really be friends and that they be the kind of contacts who would be interested in getting game-related news. There is at least one way that Google could determine that without mind-reading: they can watch a viewer’s history of interacting with (showing, hiding, commenting upon) game-related content. Google might also be able to infer from your history whether your interactions tend to be business-oriented (e.g. with office document attachments) or social (e.g. with image attachments).

Google should follow Facebook’s lead here. Facebook allows you to have different “types” of friends and could theoretically use your groupings to direct your tweets. Google should similarly encourage you to group the people you follow into categories that it could use to infer message relevance.

Feeds

Google Buzz, like Twitter, is fundamentally organized around the idea of feeds. Feeds have also been important at Facebook for years, and they get more and more so with each revision of the user interface.

Here are some examples of how we use feeds in some of our games:

* when a player accomplishes something boast-worthy, we encourage her to post it to her wall and Twitter feed. This informs other players of the game that something noteworthy has happened, deepens her reward (in the same way that standing on a podium accentuates an Olympic medal) and informs her friends about the existence of the game.
* when a player needs help, we encourage her to inform her friends through the wall or Twitter feed. This helps them build a feeling of cooperation.
* when a player has a surplus item that might help a friend, we suggest she offer it to friends through feeds
* when a player generates a creative work, like a customized car or a fantasy hockey team, we encourage her to show it off through feeds
* when a player makes an interesting or potentially controversial move (such as swapping a hockey veteran for an up-and-comer) we encourage her to get feedback through feed posts
* and of course we always encourage a player to recruit friends through feeds

Spamminess and Control

One of the central design challenges in social gaming is how to use feeds without abusing them. Some curmudgeons think that any use is an abuse, and some games vendors are shameless in their spamminess. The most fundamental ground rule is that game players must always have complete control over what is posted.

By default, Facebook allows the application to prompt the user to post any particular item. If the app is Facebook Connected, but not embedded in Facebook itself, then Facebook uses an HTML “iframe” to ensure that the user is talking directly to Facebook when giving permission to post the item. Twitter’s API seems much more primitive: one must either give an application complete access to Twitter or none at all. It cannot be done on a per-message basis.

Control on the recipient’s side is also very important. Even the most cynical game publisher benefits when their messages are received only by those who will apreeciate it. This is because game players will free more free to publish content if they know that readers have an easy way to filter the feed. Facebook allows users to hide updates from a certain friend or from a certain app. Twitter does not keep track of which application a tweet comes from and therefore cannot filter them by application. This means that game players must be much more conservative about what they publish for all of their followers.

In general, the Twitter model is simpler than Facebook’s. Twitter’s model is “you publish something” and “your followers read it”: like a blog. These primitive controls are especially acute in Twitter, which many “early adopters” use as a business marketing tool. No thought leader wants to encourage their audience to “unfollow” them.

Facebook’s model is more like “you publish something” and then “Facebook uses an inscrutable and complex algorithm” to determine whether to show it to your friends. This gives Facebook the leeway to filter out game-related posts from the sites of disinterested users.

Google is obviously following the Facebook model. Here’s what they say:

“Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like “brb.” These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we’re working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.”

Multimedia

Facebook wall posts can include graphics, flash, music and hundreds of characters of text. Twitter posts are always 140 characters of text. Obviously games benefit from Facebook’s more flexible model. For example, in Need for Speed Nitro for Facebook, we allow users to post pictures of their customized cars to their wall and photo album. Google is also following Facebook’s lead here. Buzz can attach media files just like Facebook. Even more interesting is Buzz’s capacity to attach location information. As we’ll discuss in future posts, there are many interesting ways to use location data in social games.

Summary

Google Buzz has to solve its perceived privacy problems and the bad, ummm, buzz around its launch before it can be of value to anybody. But if Google can generally get its user base back on side then there are some simple techniques it can use to turn Buzz into a rich social gaming platform. Users must have control over their friend list and their posts: both incoming and outgoing. They must be able to post multimedia and text of a reasonable length. In general: Buzz must ensure that the right information gets to the right readers: if they do that, they’ll make up for the rocky launch.

Courtesy of Flick'rs kylemac

As you may or may not know, there are a few of us that keep the Ayogo Games’ engine in good working order, inside and out. You might have read my post explaining what my role is here, and if you’ve clicked on any of the authors’ links, you can easily figure out what they do. But still, there are a handful of other Ayogos (as I call the people that work here) that we haven’t had a chance to introduce to you, until now! (We think that they’re pretty spectacular people with interesting things to say, hopefully, you do too!)

Here’s the first Q&A in a series of many to come with one of our programmers, Damien, who has been with Ayogo (pretty much) since its inception. Damien is not only a programmer, but the guy “who has all those cool t-shirts.”He has more than 70 colourful and hilarious t-shirts that he likes to show off at work–some more provocative than others. Here are some of his thoughts about our industry.

When it comes to the virality of games…

In this industry, game makers have to balance getting their games out there and noticed with annoying users too much. There has been a trend where users were getting spammed all the time. That’s not useful for the player. You have to message users with relevant information. In Need for Speed Nitro (we did that one!) does that well. For example, if your car has participated in a race, you’ll get an update. I think that’s interesting information for the player. This is opposed to the really inconsequential messages you get from many games.

Playing games…

I go through stages. I’ll spend a bunch of time on consoles then switch on handheld games for a while. I tend to concentrate on a very few games at a time.

I started to play Mafia Wars for research purposes for our iPhone game City of Ash. I ended up spending a lot of time there after the research was done. Ian (another dev) and I pretty much always have a game or two of Uniwar on the go.

About the popularity of social games…

You have that RPG aspect that hooks people – some sort of numerical gain – mixed with the social graph. Mob Wars, one of the first big social games, tied classic RPG elements together with the friends list.

Future of social game development…

It’s hard to say. In the beginning, users were getting messaged a lot, whereas more recently that’s changing. Facebook’s new gaming dashboard seems to be designed to help users manage that communication. It’ll encourage game developers to put out more interesting messages since each game has equal priority instead of each message. Until now it’s been quantity over quality and I think the dashboard will start encouraging more quality messages.

Interests as a programmer…

I’m interested in the lower level components of software systems: I like writing code that other programmers can use to do their jobs more effectively – components that other developers can use as building blocks.

The iPad and games…

The iPad provides, in a general sense, a new place for people to interact with technology. It’s cheaper and more portable than a desktop or laptop computer but has less processing power, no dedicated input device and it’s locked down. It’s more expensive than a netbook but you get more screen real estate and interact with the device quite differently. The increase in screen real estate over a smartphone or netbook means you can fit more information on screen and keep it readable. As for the underlying technology, we’ve already developed games for the iPhone and iPod Touch so we know how to do that part already. It’s just the interaction design that changes for us: we’ll have to design another UI, but I think it’ll be easier to do well than on the iPhone.

Your ideal technology scenario…

I think we need to work towards interoperability. We have all these interesting devices and technology, but they’re often separated. We need find a way to tie them together. We’ve started to have that with common communication technologies: you have your calendar, contacts and email available in desktop, web and phone environments. That’s a fairly recent change and it’s great, but new technology comes out and is kept segregated in its own world. This is especially bad when DRM is introduced. We need to move to a place where you can freely use information in more than one context.

If you were to make improvements…

The thing I miss most from console and PC gaming is the strong storytelling component that exists in that realm.

Designing social games…

In the current incarnation of ’social games’ they tend to be free to play so they market themselves. This means that you have to make the experience good from the get go. People keep playing them because they’re fun.

Courtesy of Flickr's jef safi pictosophizing

I’ve had a few conversations recently with friends–not in the industry–about social games (mainly, we debate the definition of “social game”). After researching the topic and speaking to some folks on our team, I thought that it would be valuable to post an article exploring what I came across. Here are some of those findings.

Backgrounder

At first glance, defining a casual social game seems simple (it seemed simple to me): games that are not played using a console like a Wii or an X-Box, games that are simple to figure out in terms of skill-level, games that are free or relatively inexpensive to play and live on Facebook and Myspace. Sound right? Depends on who you ask.

Casual Games

Casual games are defined as online games or video games that have simple rules, so that anyone can play, and they’re typically free to download or free to play online. According to some, a few years ago casual games were considered to be “lightweight games” that were played little, but often.

Facebook Games or “Social Games”

In just a few years, social games have become one of the hottest category of applications on Facebook. Some might say that these Facebook games or social games are just enhanced versions of the casual games I mentioned above. So what’s the difference? They now have a more social element to them. Since the Facebook platform opened up to developers a few years ago, what that allowed game developers to do was insert an element of socialization (or insert social graphs) into casual games (social graphs is a term defined by Facebook to describe their social network). There was an explosion of games in this “new” category and with good reason.  It seems that socializing casual games has made them more attractive and more viral.

Four Definitions of Social Games

So is a social game just a casual game on Facebook or is there more to it than that? Should social games be in a category of their own? Is it that this relatively new genre of games now provides social context to gameplay? Obviously these are concepts that explore a fascinating area and we’ll flesh these out more in a later post. Until then here are a few ideas floating around and worth considering.

1. Nick O’Neill from Social Times proposes that social games have the obvious common features of being multi-player and being based on social platforms.  But for Nick, social games should also have a turn-based system as a feature ( enable users to take turns) and they have to present a social context (being aware of others’ actions).

As I’ve spent time looking at the games on Facebook for this article, I would agree that most of the games I play, for example Friends for Sale! have a strong social context. The entire game is based around actions and conversations that I’ll be having with my close friends, colleagues and even family members. Once these elements are introduced (knowing which friends are worth more, how these friends react to your gifts), this all starts to have more meaning..it impacts the way I play and puts it all into a more meaningful place for me. Nabel Hyatt from GigaOm would agree with me, as according to him social gaming allows us to have fun together but with meaning.

2. A UK-based social game developer proposes that social games are not defined by being on a social network. Rather, they’re built around rewarding players for using social skills effectively in the game. As we’ve explained in a previous post, understanding engaging game mechanics  are very important to building social games, so for me, this definition would make sense.

3. I found a blog post by Jeremy Liew who is a VC that invests in social gaming companies. His take on this issue? He says social gaming is a tactic, not a category at all. (A bit controversial?). I’ll let you digest his post on your own, but essentially, Jeremy argues that only defining social games as being on social networks and having a viral component is a limiting concept.

4. For the purpose of this article, we came up with our own definition of social games:

A social game utilizes your social graph in a meaningful way. It matters that there are other people there, and relating to them in some way is a significant component of the game play. These games often are built using published APIs from social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.

What is your definition of a social game? Do you believe that social games deserve their own category and if so why? Contact us or leave a comment.