Social games are big.

And I mean that in two entirely different ways. Last week I attended the Social Gaming Summit, the latest event to focus on a growing sector of the game industry. The term “social games” is actually a slight misnomer — referring to games built on social networks (eg: Scrabulous, Parking Wars), rather than those played in person amongst groups of peers (eg: Mafia, Red Light Green Light). But for the 400 publishers, developers, and investors gathered in San Francisco last Friday, social gaming meant very large user bases, and the potential for big, big returns.

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.