Industry veteran Brenda Brathwaite has taken a keen interest in Facebook, and its role as a nascent platform for game development. Because of the social network built into the site, and the ability for any app to tap into that network, Facebook is most definitely not familiar territory in terms of game design, something which only a few developers have realized as of yet.

As I see it, games on Facebook exist in three distinct categories, which I’m calling “flat”, “shallow”, and “deep”. These terms describe the degree to which each game takes advantage of the Facebook social network, and do not reflect the quality of each game.

Flat games exist on Facebook, but they might as well exist anywhere else. They’re almost always single-player, and do not involve the available social network through the gameplay. (I want to stress “through the gameplay,” as many of these apps do take advantage of the network to create leaderboards and share high-scores, but this does not affect how the core game operates). Examples are popular apps like Jetman, Tower Bloxx, and the copious arcade compilation apps that let users play classics like Snake and Tetris. Sometimes, these apps are simply Flash applications ported to Facebook.

Shallow games do utilize the social network in gameplay, but usually to a fairly limited degree. Examples of this include Texas Hold-Em Poker, and the ever-so-excellent Scrabulous application, both of which use your friend list to organize potential opponents. Scrabulous was the first app I encountered that made smart use of Facebook, turning Scrabble into a divine play-by-mail-esque experience. Still, the gameplay is largely unaffected by the network.

Finally, deep games take more direct advantage of Facebook’s features, building core mechanics around social networks, and using additional methods to incorporate the whole of Facebook into the gameplay. The best example of this is the Werewolves/Vampires/Zombies application(s) which took the gameplay onto Facebook’s walls and PMs, as players lured unsuspecting friends in order to increase their power. A more recent addition to the deep end is area/code’s Parking Wars, which has users leaving cars on the streets of their friends in a strange parking-oriented version of “chicken.” Both games re-imagined the social network as something else (be it food or free parking), and built gameplay around this fiction.

Both games also offer incentives for inviting more friends to play, which contributes to their fast-growing popularity. Brenda goes more in-depth on the dark-side of Facebook propagation, but I would certainly be interested in exploring non-invasive means of designing deep Facebook games. Expect at least one more post on this topic.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under facebook, game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.