Social Networking Games.

Social network games are all the rage. For casual developers they are the next big thing. Or at least many seem to think so.

I am seeing a lot of casual games being shoe-horned to become 'social network' games. One of the ones I have been watching is Farm Town, which seems to be rather typical.

What these games seem to be focusing on is providing incentive to build up as large of social networks as possible. This is done though gatekeepers (i.e. certain functionality can not be turned on unless you have X friends in game) and gifting.

Both of these seem to be features for the sake of having features that can be called 'social'. The gatekeeper one is an especially shallow feature and does little more then either (a) keep people from features or (b) encourage the player to friend list a bunch of people for no reason.

The later, gifting, is a bit more clever and gives a real reward without actually preventing people from play. Still, the feature feels kinda hokey, something slapped on to make it 'social network compliant'.

This is a case where I am really not sure what a better solutions might be. It could be that the 'right' solution is none at all. Adding features for the sake of having them is not always a good thing.

An example of this would be Wii titles. For every title that has a good reason for motion control there are 5 that force motion control into the game just for the sake of having it. Generally when this has been done it has resulted in a title that does WORSE for it. For instance, DeBlob. Good game... if they had just dropped the motion control. It was not needed, added nothing, and detracted from the game.

Perhaps what social network games need is to stop trying to be social network games and start adding in social features as they truly extend playability.

I will be curious to see what CCP does with COSMOS. They are going the other direction, taking an existing game and adding a social layer to it from scratch. So building a social network site off a social game rather then building a social game off an existing site.

Time will tell.