What core gamers should know about social games

 Posted by (Visited 37425 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 182010
 

The culture clash between social games and core gamers was on full display at GDC. I have been called a traitor to the cause of core gamers, even. 🙂 At the awards show, when a Zynga rep claimed the social games award for Farmville and did a little bit of recruiting from the stage, he was not only booed, but someone shouted out, “But you don’t make games!” This is a common sentiment out there in the usual gamer haunts.

I have many many thoughts on all this — and I have been posting some of them in various places when discussions arise.

Yes, Farmville is a game. It just requires fairly little skill compared to games for “advanced” gamers. But by any reasonable definition of game, it fits perfectly. Continue reading »

FiveBooks on games

 Posted by (Visited 6669 times)  Game talk, Reading  Tagged with: ,
Mar 162010
 

FiveBooks is this neat site whose tagline is “The best five books on everything.” Basically, they pick a subject matter expert, and that person talks about five books that cover that subject. Tom Chatfield picked FiveBooks on games, and A Theory of Fun was one of them, alongside  classics like Homo Ludens and Flow. Quite nice company!

While you are there, check out Aleks Krotoski’s five books about the Web; and props to Julian Dibbell, who gets a book on each list!

Between the two lists, there’s only one book I haven’t read — and it’s the one on sports. Hmm.

GameBreakr interview

 Posted by (Visited 7833 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , ,
Mar 142010
 

While at GDC I did an interview with Gary Gannon of GameBreakr, and it’s now up on the site as two video clips. They were posted up with Justin.tv, and I can’t figure out how to embed them here… topics discussed include why core gamers should be excited about social games, where do AAA MMOs sit, and trends at GDC like 3d displays. But the link lets you watch them both back to back — it’s about 20 minutes worth of me blathering on.

Edit: here’s the vids!

Continue reading »

GDC10: Scaling Social Games, Robert Zubek

 Posted by (Visited 32509 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Mar 122010
 

Scalable Social Games, Robert Zubek of Zynga (liveblog)

Social games interesting from an engineering point of view sinc ethey live at the intersection of games and web. We spend time thinking about making games fun, making players want to come back. We know those engineering challenges, but the web introduces its own set, especially around users arriving somewhat unpredictably, effects where huge populations come in suddenly. SNSes are a great example of this, with spreading network effects and unpredictable traffi fluctuations.

At Zynga we have 65m daily players, 225m monthly. And usage can vary drastically — Roller Coaster Kingdom gained 1m DAUs in one weekend going from 700k to 1.7m. Another example, Fishville grow from 0 to 6m DAUs in one week. Huge scalability challenges. And finally, Farmville grew 25m DAUs in five months. The cliff is not as steep but the order of magnitude difference adds its own challenge.

Talk outline: Introducing game developers to best practices for web development. Maybe you come from consoles or mobile or whatever, the web world introduces its own set of challenges and also a whole set of solutions that are already developed that we steal, or, uh, learn from. 🙂 If you are alreayd an experiened web developer, you may know this stuff already.

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