Ian, if you’re paying attention, here’s how to improve your Facebook game about Facebook games.

1) Reduce the Click Window: Currently I can only click my cow once every six hours. MouseHunt lets me sound the hunter’s horn every 15 MINUTES. And I can cook cheeseburgers in Café World in only five. Procrastination and distraction operate on fairly tight cycles. How often do we refresh our RSS Readers? Our Twitter pages? Facebook? Try a 15 minute window. Let me click my cow every 15 minutes.

2) Make the Stream Stories Actually DO Something: You’re spoofing the infamous “Lost Cow” viral, but you’ve missed why it started a trend. People aren’t clicking cows for their health. They’re clicking them because they get something for it (namely, a cow). If a newsfeed is not incentivized, it’s only valuable as advertising to new players, and a reminder to those who haven’t played recently. When incentivized, every player has a reason to click it. Click click click.

Try awarding one Click to each player who clicks a Cow Clicker Stream Story. And while you’re at it, award one Click back to the poster for each player who clicked. All your newsfeeds do right now is breach the platform policy (VI.A.1, if you’re curious).

3) Prime the Mooney Pump: Paying players are a little like vampires. Once they’ve tasted blood, it’s hard to stop. Wet their fangs with 15 Mooney — enough for one low-level cow, and enough left over to make them want to reach for cooler cows.

You can then keep priming the pump with small amounts of Mooney awarded to players. Create a low instance in which upon clicking, a cow in your pasture will, ahem, “drop” some Mooney. More cows in your pasture means higher chance of Mooney droppings, means more of a reason to invite friends.

4) Send me a Highland Coo: I guess this won’t actually help you in any way, but they just look so fuzzy.

So yes, social games are big, in the sense that it’s a brand new market a lot of people are excited about right now. But they’re also big in another way. I’ve mentioned before that Facebook is a unique platform for game design, but neglected to mention its biggest feature: size.

If you’re designing a deep social game, you need to think about scalability on an entirely new scale. This isn’t “five to ten players”; this is “five to ten thousand” (or if you’re lucky, many more than that). Infrastructure aside, the design itself can’t buckle under the weight of unexpected growth, or wilt when too few are playing.

I’ll talk more about scaling for design in a later post. Needless to say, I’ve taken a keen interest in the social gaming space. Interacting with the APIs of social networking applications can yield tremendously potent results, and the relaxed, asynchronous nature of such sites lends itself to tabletop adaptations and casual games — which just happen to be my strong suits. I think I’m going to like it here.

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.