The Social Gaming genre brought to the world very different gaming experience from what we were used to.
Let's see which 3 elements had the main influence in this gaming revolution:
1. Slow pace
In the "old world", the one before social gaming, the most successful games were highly addictive in the straight and powerful way. If you remember the Tetris-mania, surely you recall all those people playing Tetris for hours. You couldn't communicate with them during the game, they were totally into it. Even Minesweeper, the game that comes with MS Windows OS, is such. I've got under 100 seconds on the hard level. It took me weeks of everyday practice. Up today, I spent more than 1000 hours playing the game.
Social Gaming is completely different. You are limited in the time you can spend playing. In most of the games there is energy or equivalent that doesn't allow you to play more than 30-45 minutes at once. Than you have to wait. And you have to come back. It doesn't mean that social games aren't addictive - they are! But in another, much slower pace.
Of course, there is no problem to speed up the things. It will cost you just a few dollars.
This great idea have 2 consequences: you're coming back frequently and you have enough time to miss the game. You are not "having enough" of the game quickly, people plays social games like FarmVille for years!
2. Creativity
Or I shall say "the sense of creativity"?
The aim of most of social games is to build something. It can be a farm, city, mafia, garden, village or any other complex structure. Since not everybody have enough talent for arts, there are ready made building blocks. It turns the social games to sort of virtual do-it-yourself playing field. You feel creative, you choose where to put the house and where the store should be. There is also a game plot. You have tasks. So, the building blocks are prepared, you are well directed what to do, but still, the sense of creativity is there.
The main challenge here is to keep the balance between the freedom of player to be creative and directions that will keep the player on the track.
Let's take for example two similar games: FrontierVille by Zynga and Wild West Town by ClipWire Games. Both games are dealing with the Wild West, but FrontierVille has close to 14M monthly active users, while Wild West Town has just a little bit more thant 1M. There are lot of reasons for the difference, one of the main is Zynga's strength and huge amount of active users playing their other games. Nevertheless, there is another important factor. Wild West Town has a nice, but very demanding story. If you suddenly felt creative during the game and you have done something that is not part of the given tasks, you may find yourself doing it again in a while, in order to fulfill a new task that just arrived. It is frustrating and players don't like it.
So, give your players an opportunity to feel creative, but don't leave them alone to lose themselves in your game.
3. Playing with your friends
Of course, you will say, those are social games. You're right! But, the emphasis here is the word with, which is opposite to the word against your friends. You're helping each other, you can't finish your tasks without their help. Another important aspect is that places where your friends have an obvious effect to the outcome of your play are under your control. So, you're still the one that exploits your own creativity from the point 2, but you can't advance without help of your friends.
In this situation, you're sharing. It is the name of the game in the social world - sharing, and you are willingly doing it again and again.
Summary
There is no magic formula to make a successful social game. At least, when you're preparing your social game, you can make sure that the aspects we discussed here are there. They will make you closer to the success.
Let's see which 3 elements had the main influence in this gaming revolution:
1. Slow pace
In the "old world", the one before social gaming, the most successful games were highly addictive in the straight and powerful way. If you remember the Tetris-mania, surely you recall all those people playing Tetris for hours. You couldn't communicate with them during the game, they were totally into it. Even Minesweeper, the game that comes with MS Windows OS, is such. I've got under 100 seconds on the hard level. It took me weeks of everyday practice. Up today, I spent more than 1000 hours playing the game.
Social Gaming is completely different. You are limited in the time you can spend playing. In most of the games there is energy or equivalent that doesn't allow you to play more than 30-45 minutes at once. Than you have to wait. And you have to come back. It doesn't mean that social games aren't addictive - they are! But in another, much slower pace.
Of course, there is no problem to speed up the things. It will cost you just a few dollars.
This great idea have 2 consequences: you're coming back frequently and you have enough time to miss the game. You are not "having enough" of the game quickly, people plays social games like FarmVille for years!
2. Creativity
Or I shall say "the sense of creativity"?
The aim of most of social games is to build something. It can be a farm, city, mafia, garden, village or any other complex structure. Since not everybody have enough talent for arts, there are ready made building blocks. It turns the social games to sort of virtual do-it-yourself playing field. You feel creative, you choose where to put the house and where the store should be. There is also a game plot. You have tasks. So, the building blocks are prepared, you are well directed what to do, but still, the sense of creativity is there.
The main challenge here is to keep the balance between the freedom of player to be creative and directions that will keep the player on the track.
Let's take for example two similar games: FrontierVille by Zynga and Wild West Town by ClipWire Games. Both games are dealing with the Wild West, but FrontierVille has close to 14M monthly active users, while Wild West Town has just a little bit more thant 1M. There are lot of reasons for the difference, one of the main is Zynga's strength and huge amount of active users playing their other games. Nevertheless, there is another important factor. Wild West Town has a nice, but very demanding story. If you suddenly felt creative during the game and you have done something that is not part of the given tasks, you may find yourself doing it again in a while, in order to fulfill a new task that just arrived. It is frustrating and players don't like it.
So, give your players an opportunity to feel creative, but don't leave them alone to lose themselves in your game.
3. Playing with your friends
Of course, you will say, those are social games. You're right! But, the emphasis here is the word with, which is opposite to the word against your friends. You're helping each other, you can't finish your tasks without their help. Another important aspect is that places where your friends have an obvious effect to the outcome of your play are under your control. So, you're still the one that exploits your own creativity from the point 2, but you can't advance without help of your friends.
In this situation, you're sharing. It is the name of the game in the social world - sharing, and you are willingly doing it again and again.
Summary
There is no magic formula to make a successful social game. At least, when you're preparing your social game, you can make sure that the aspects we discussed here are there. They will make you closer to the success.
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