The Emergence of Social Games

Gothenburg.
And we’re in the final session of AoIR 2010 – it’s been a fun and very busy conference. I might be a little distracted in my coverage of this session, as the Hannover 96 – FC Köln game is on at the moment as well… 2:0 at the moment!

We’re starting with Lisbeth Klastrup, who notes that gaming on Facebook has really taken off in recent times; the Farmville application has been most popular so far, with millions of users. Studying social media network games has become an growing sub-set of digital games research, too.

Social media games tend to be casual games: with limited complexity, shortish game sessions, and a tendency to convert non-gamers to casual gaming. These games are designed to be social: to be played within the framework of the social network site, and functioning as a socialisation tool (using friends as part of the game). One question, then, is how friends are addressed in these games.

Around one quarter of the players appear to be completely new players, who have never played computer games before, and the demographics cluster around the 18-25 age range (35% on Facebook), but there are also many older players – and there is also great diversity of backgrounds. There is a relatively equal number of men and women playing these games, but this is distributed differently across different specific games.

Additionally, new games discourses are emerging around these games, including the usual scare stories: one kid in the UK stole his mum’s credit card number to pay for Farmville content, while Mafia Wars addiction has also been reported. Social game motivations don’t seen to be all that different from those for playing other games, though.

In the west, unsurprisingly, Facebook social media games are most popular, but they also exist across other social media spaces – many such games are now emerging on Chinese platforms, for example.