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There is a question being bandied about by people in the game industry. It effects something you do, or, if you don't, your friend, roommate, wife or fencing opponent does. Social gaming. Is social gaming - games played on social networks, like Facebook and MySpace - actually gaming? Millions of users have already given their tacit approval that there is indeed entertainment value in those games. But what puts hardcore gamers' skivvies in a knot is the idea that there has been total sacrifice of gameplay in exchange for filthy lucre - that these "games" have been so neutered that they only outwardly resemble gaming. And so the more important question is this: Are hardcore gamers simply demanding that all cars on the road be sports cars, or are they a bellwether of a shift in social gaming from click-click-click, to quality? Sponsor "Social games are making tons of money," said Karen Clark, a Project Manager at Electronic Arts. "They are like slot machines made legal and web-accessible. There's a lot of investment. Most game people think these 'games' suck because they are more like exercises in clicking and monetization of customers than they are fun." It is a burgeoning area. In December, Digital Sky Technologies bought into Zynga for $180 million. EA snapped up PlayFish for $400 million and Playdom, whose "Social City" game racked up 10 million players in about a month of existence, scored a $43 million series B . Most social games as well as some casual games make use a business model of selling in-game "currency" for the purchase of anything from fertilizer to a straight-razor and combining that with player-privileges sales and advertising. "The business model for social games worked really well," said Mark Hendrickson of Big Fish, a Seattle-based gaming company, "because there were only a few companies who could harvest all the affiliate money and swamp anyone else's efforts by putting that money right back into the Facebook ad network. I really think they should have called it 'Facebook gaming.' Social gaming is only on the radar because it is a really, really cheap way to possibly make a whole lot of money, if implemented properly. "As Facebook goes, so goes social gaming." Tami Baribeau, the producer of Metaplace's Island Life game on Facebook, sees it very differently. "Games go where people go," she said. "Social networks are clearly a hot platform right now because it's where people are spending time on the web." She attributes the fiction that gameplay is compromised to hardcore gamer prejudice more than to any pandering to a lowest common denominator. "The fact that social games are whittled down to their basic core mechanics and feedback loop mean that they're instantly understandable, casual, and the fun is easy to find. This is why they open up the market to so many people, and such a different demographic than traditional console/PC gaming. Traditional gamers don't like to admit (or simply don't realize) that games do not have to be massive, 3D, scripted, deep, and immersive experiences in order to be fun and engaging and monetizable. " Alex Swanson, Project Lead at Playdom, also disagrees with the notion that good gameplay is stepped back in social gaming. "Initially computers themselves were extremely complex and difficult to learn, so the platform self-selected for people that were tolerant of (or even attracted by) complexity," he said. "Since then computers have be come much more accessible, creating a gap in the market between the average computer user and the average 'gamer.' "Part of the reason that games like these were never very successful prior to the existence of social networks is once again an issue of accessibility. These games are built around the idea that the user has a connected identity. Trying to ask users to build out their social graph as part of entering a game would create an insurmountable barrier to entry. Fortunately, Facebook has already convinced the players to do this by providing its own unique benefits." If you play social games, you probably do not care about this argument. You play because it's fun. Maybe that's enough. Maybe it's not for one group of gamers to tell another that they oughtn't love what they love. "All I know," said one social gamer, " is I've met the nicest people playing Mafia Wars." For another view of social gaming, see ReadWriteWeb's post on Armchair Revolutionary . Discuss
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Social Gaming: Legit Gameplay or a Play for Your Cash?
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Imagine if the tens of millions who give time and money to tending their Farmville game were instead working for social change. A team of Hollywood's elite talent has been working with an army of advisors for six years to create a game building infrastructure that will make it so. Armchair Revolutionary is a social gaming and strategic crowdsourcing concept that's based on real life social needs. The games are designed to connect the real-time Web to real-time social change. Sponsor Social Change Innovators is a non-profit that wholly-owns Armchair Revolutionary LLC . ArmRev projects are funded by $0.99 gifts by its users. These funds are donated to charities and in some cases are invested in for-profit startups in exchange for an equity position. Profits from these investments are then reinvested into other social change projects on the ArmRev site. The gifting concept is true to the recent sea change in online gaming , which is driven by virtual currency. In a few years ArmRev will scale up to 250 games annually. These games aim to use augmented reality and Internet of Things in a way that's more fun, more popular and more real than Farmville could ever be. The first three games to be introduced are: Make Waves, End of Darkness and Hack Your Body. Hack Your Body includes quizzes about genetic research, as well as software tools to track your body's health. End of Darkness also has quizzes and learning activities, but this program is unique in that it funds for-profit franchises who will sell low cost solar kits to poor people in India, eventually around the world. Make Waves is a simulation game that's augmented with data from real world sensors. It's similar to adopt-a-rainforest campaigns where you adopt a specific patch of the planet, but what's unique about this game is that the player will be connected to real-time ocean sensors. Each ArmRev user has their own social change dashboard which is modeled after a personal stock market portfolio dashboard. ArmRev's game projects are produced by the Play4Change Lab, which is a: "...collaboration between USC's Game Institute and The Hollywood Hill. The lab specializes in games that integrate new technologies such as sensor networks, augmented reality, simulation, and virtual goods." To set up your ArmRev Profile go here . To submit your social change project to ArmRev go here . To submit your photos and art to benefit social good go here . Discuss
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ArmRev: Hollywood Games The Web For Social Good
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What applications are the earliest testers of the Apple iPad trying out? Even though the "official" launch day for the new slate touchscreen computer isn't until tomorrow, April 3rd, several journalists and even some celebrities have already got their hands on one. And what are the top applications for folks like this? There are the usual suspects, of course: The Wall St. Journal, iBooks, Netflix (yes, it was true !), USA Today, ABC Player, NYT Editors' Choice, NPR and others. But all these apps are free, big-name brands and precisely the sorts of things the iPad was designed for. What's more interesting is a glance at the paid applications list for the iPad. Sponsor iPad's Top Apps the Day Before Launch Yesterday, iPad applications became available in the iTunes App Store. They appeared in searches for terms like "XL" and "HD" - the new acronyms developers are using to denote which of their mobile apps have been reconfigured for the slate's larger screen. And although very few people actually have their iPad yet, a number of iPad apps have been downloaded, either by the early testers themselves or by those who are preparing their collection for tomorrow's first-time sync. In the free applications list, there are few surprises. From one to ten, the top free apps are: iBooks, Netflix, ABC Player, USA Today, The Wall St. Journal, NYT Editors' Choice, NPR for iPad, Twitterific for iPad, eBay for iPad and Shazam for iPad. Early Trend: iPad is Used for More than Media Consumption However, the paid applications list hints at two early trends that may bode well for the device's future and one that may not. First, the good news. The iPad, despite its consumer appeal, is already making headway as a productivity application.
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A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That's the kind of news I like to know and so I'm very excited that MSNBC's hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon. EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood by neighborhood, or in this case block by block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here's what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we've probably ever had before. Sponsor Does existing local media consider EveryBlock a threat? Local TV news personality and new media experimenter Stephanie Stricklen doesn't. "I can't think of any reason why it's not awesome," she told us. "Any time you bring another source of information into a city, especially one where you can access info about such a small geographic perspective, I like that." "No matter what you think of online journalism, everything is changing and the more players that come to the table the better we are all. We serve different audiences. The local TV stations could never have the time to visit every single block every day, there's not enough people, not even the newspaper could." Might local human reporters use a service like EveryBlock to find stories they should investigate and put in context? "Absolutely," Stricklen said, "I can see myself using something like this." As I write this story, some kind of animal problem has been reported at an intersection near where I live and an experimental short film screening was just blogged about by a neighborhood arts organization. The films aren't my style, to be frank, but I love that I am aware of the event. In fact, many of the updates from public records are maddeningly unclear. Many others are so trivial that lots of readers wouldn't consider them news. The health department visited the Chinese restaurant down the street and found the ice-scooper stuck handle-side down in the ice machine! Some lady said she didn't like the tapas restaurant on Yelp. Someone just flagged down a police car, but EveryBlock has no idea what it was about. To this EveryBlock's Dan O'Neil says: "Are there gaps in EveryBlock's knowledge? Yes. Are there gaps in human knowledge in real life? Yes! There's a comment field, help us out!" Is this a newswire of completed stories? No, this is something different. (But it is complete publishing of the public records your taxpayer funded agencies make available, O'Neil points out.) To be honest, I like reading that kind of stuff. Maybe you do too. As O'Neil says, "we do have a wider definition of what news is." Not everyone feels satisfied with the level of detail being provided or the absence of filtering the signal from the noise. It's hard to imagine machines replacing the human storytelling that journalists provide. The machines could augment that journalism, though, and there's lots of room for them to do an even better job of it. Where Humans and Machine Work Together EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty told us in January that the organization had hired a full-time editor to research various government agency codes in order to articulate public records in a more human-readable way. "It's one thing to publish public records; it's another to make sense of them," he said. EveryBlock's O'Neil told us that editor's name is Paul Wilson and said Paul put in hours interviewing Portland municipal staff in order to translate the data fields the city publishes into the format EveryBlock now publishes. O'Neil says those municipal staff members are unsung heroes, especially Rick Nixon of the Bureau of Technology Services. "It's a very complex endeavor to publish regularly updated data," O'Neil says. "Portland has excellent meta data and contact info, but a lot of times it's hard to get to the expertise and for those experts to explain it to someone else. When it's not your job to answer phone calls from web developers and tell them what spreadsheets mean, it's tough. We're in a weird gap time. In the future the expectations and questions we bring to data will be more common and it will be a part of peoples' job descriptions - but the people in Portland should be commended for already really trying to figure out what these things mean." Portland makes a lot of this data officially available as part of its brand new CivicApps program, but EveryBlock worked with the county restaurant inspection agency to get that data in particular through other channels. "We're cycling through 5,000 restaurants on a nightly basis," O'Neil says, "and the restaurant inspections in Portland are the most plain language content of all the cities we look at. It's great to see those people speaking in human and not just municipal language." Home Team Geeks "What will be really exciting is to see what Portland's indigenous community of developers and web journos do with the content the city is making available," says Steve Suo, Editor and Executive Vice President of Portland's real-time, white-label EveryBlock competitor NozzlMedia . Nozzl is made up of long-time newspaper guys, now building something for the future. (See our write-up of Nozzl: " Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters ") EveryBlock's arrival in town happened just days after the city's celebrated opening of a substantial amount of new data through CivicApps, and with help from the city. Nozzl thinks it can do a better job of putting this data into context. "The more eyes you have on the data, the more insights we'll see brought to bear," Suo says. "We're currently adding all the same Portland data for our Portland metro news customers," Nozzl co-founder and CEO Steve Woodward says. Woodward says that in addition to prioritizing context and serving white-label customers, Nozzl pulls from more sources of data, covers a broader geographic area, and focuses on real-time data. "EveryBlock will tell you what crimes occurred near your home over the last several days. Nozzl will give you information about that siren you hear at this very moment." EveryBlock's O'Neil basically says bring it on , pointing to Portland's mere 5 minute delay on 911 call data and his site's real-time bulletin feature. These are remarkable times. There are services like EveryBlock, Nozzl, Outside.in , Fwix and more all battling it out to best serve us users with new and innovative ways to drill down into more details about our immediate physical surroundings. EveryBlock is the biggest player in the game, though, and our awareness of hyper-local news here in tech-savvy Portland has probably been changed for good. Discuss
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The Day EveryBlock Came to Town
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It's no longer a secret that China's online gaming industry is booming, and growth is set to continue with companies such as Shanda Games , Netease and The9 leading the way. In 2009, China's online gaming industry earned nearly $4 billion, growing 39.5% from 2008 . Each day, millions of high school students trying to forget the pressures of college entrance exams and young adults discontent with their jobs flock to Internet cafes to play online role-playing games. They're part of China's 384 million netizens , and they sit in front of rows of computers in dimly lighted smoke-filled rooms for upwards of eight hours at a time, living in virtual worlds to escape the pressures of contemporary Chinese life. Sponsor Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer , an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter . But beyond the Internet cafés, social games have emerged as a convenient alternative for students and workers alike to gain a sense of release and revitalize themselves before tackling the next assignment of the day in their everyday lives. They take breaks to tend to their garden on 5 Minutes' Happy Farm (Kaixin Nongchang) farming game, or steal their friend's car parking space on Kaixin001 's Qiang Chewei. RenRenWang (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001 and Tencent's QQ Xiaoyou are leading SNS portals, and are the go-to sites to access China's most popular gaming applications. The widespread popularity of social games is not solely limited to white collar workers in their 20s - social gaming appeals to China's youth, their middle-aged parents, and even elderly retirees looking to share a common hobby with relatives spread throughout the country. The social gaming landscape is developing at an extremely rapid pace, with competition growing increasingly fierce by the day. What Makes a 'Winning' Social Game in China? The most popular social games in China are simple to play and appeal to a broad audience. These winning games take place in easily recognizable environments such as kitchens, gardens and parking lots, and only require a few clicks of a mouse to have a shared social gaming experience with your friends. Happy Farm is the most popular Chinese social game to date. Created by Shanghai-based social game developer 5 Minutes, the game is quite similar to Zynga's FarmVille. Players own a virtual farm where they plant fruits and vegetables. They purchase supplies like seeds, pesticide and fertilizer at a virtual market. While part of the game is about growing and protecting your own harvest, the real fun is sneaking into your friends' farms to steal their vegetables. The game is easy to learn, taps into traditional Chinese farming culture and is extremely addictive - appealing to the young, the old and everyone in between. Which Social Game Developers in China You Should Know About? 5 Minutes (五分钟) , CEO: Shaofei Gao 5 Minutes was founded in 2006 by three college students. In November 2008 it released Happy Farm (below) and achieved immediate success, partnering with leading SNS portals, and receiving a one-time multi-million Chinese RMB payment from Tencent for full rights to the game on its QQZone platform. At the end of 2009, 5 Minutes received $3.5 million in venture capital funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson . Rekoo (热酷) , CEO: Yong Liu Founded in 2008, Rekoo is one of China's leading social gaming developers with several domestic partners: RenRenWang, 51.com, Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu . Rekoo also has strategic overseas partnerships with Facebook, MIXI, Myspace and Cyworld. Rekoo's most successful games are Sunshine Ranch and Animal Paradise. IsMole (奇矩互动) , CEO: Edwin Chen Founded in 2008, IsMole started off as a market-leading game developer for social networks, but quickly lost its competitive edge to others like 5 Minutes and Rekoo. IsMole's is best known for its Xingfu Chufang (below) cooking social game that has been released in five different languages across seven countries on thirteen different SNS platforms. Kingnet Games (恺英网络) , CEO: Yue Wang Founded in 2008, Kingnet first released Tower of Babel in April 2009, and within three months had over 500,000 users. In July 2009 Kingnet received venture capital investment from KPCB China. In October 2009, Kingnet had over 2 million users on Facebook. Challenges Facing Social Game Developers Social game development in China has entered a period of tremendous growth, but it has yet to fully mature. Companies compete fiercely with varying levels of experience and capital to create the next winning game. Two major challenges have arisen as a result of this environment. 1. Lack of Innovation: There is an overall lack of diversity in gaming context. Copying is rampant amongst competitors - once a social game is proven successful, competitors begin producing their own versions. For example, there are numerous games that take place in farms such as 5 Minutes' Happy Farm: Rekoo's Sunshine Ranch, Kaixin001's Kaixin Huayuan, and Zhiming Xingtong's Happy Farmer. 2. Lack of Continuous Improvement: There is a tendency for developers to stop investing in the game after it is on the SNS platform. In some cases this is due to lack of sufficient capital, while others stop because they're trying to make multiple games to obtain a quick return on investment. This lack of continuous improvement creates short game lifecycles, as user experience ultimately suffers, and a short period of success finally leads to replacement by the next popular game. To win in this environment over the long-term, it is unavoidable that operational costs will continue to rise, as developers must continuously improve the quality and uniqueness of their games to fend off domestic competition and maintain their market share. This Is Only The Beginning Despite these challenges, there is tremendous growth potential in social gaming in China. The first years of growth in China's social game development have served as a foundation. The next few years will see a convergence between social games and 3G mobile gaming. The social game user base that is predominantly comprised of students and young white-collar workers will continue to grow with even more older players joining the crowd. While Chinese companies will continue to face a competitive market at home, the best companies will develop unique winning strategies domestically and localize them to win success overseas. In a recent interview, 5 Minute's CEO Shaofei Gao was quoted as saying : "China's netizens are becoming more mature, they are gradually becoming more accustomed to paying for gaming, and social gaming market opportunities will definitely continue to increase in the future." Discuss
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China's Social Gaming Landscape: What's Coming Next
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