While previous years in Facebook gaming have been dominated by one genre (such as farming sims) or one company (such as Zynga), 2011′s most popular games suggest a growing diversity and sophistication of the market.

The above quote from Inside Social Games' summary of the year's most popular games - our Zombie Lane included! - is quite telling of how the market has matured.

Personally, 2011 ended with very hectic months of product ownership, supervision of game designers, and contributing to studio management while simultaneously creating a new concept; therefore my posting and tweeting has been minimal. Fast times at social game development, indeed.

Nevertheless, I wish my readers and followers Happy Holidays - another exciting and game-changing new year awaits, including awesome product releases from Digital Chocolate soon!

Towards the end of his talk, Begemann touched briefly on the development of social interaction between gamers and its future evolution. Begemann drew comparisons between asynchronous gameplay in social games with the interaction often witnessed between toddlers. "Social games are parallel play. People want to play for themselves. Sometimes, they may walk up to the other and either help or destroy what the other has been doing."

I'm glad Begemann has been paying attention while listening to me talk at Casual Connect ;) Of course it was Sulka Haro from Sulake who made the initial observation with respect to the notion of parallel play in studies of kids' play. The point is really about how parallel play creates a particular kind of social presence - asynchronous one, that is. All the outcries about introducing 'more social' into social games are essentially about making social presence more intense and acute, something that the audience Begemann is talking about is not ready for nor receptive to.

The way they engage their players is not through interesting gameplay, it's done through extrinsic rewards - basically bribes." These are badges, pats on the back, and so forth. As he explains; "I'm level two! That person over there, who started playing five minutes ago, is level one! I'm better!

Read the whole Gamasutra write-up, link above. Honestly, Cityville is not fun? Army Attack is not fun? Zombie Lane is not fun? Diamond Dash is not fun? What's wrong with these people, establishing some high-brow monopoly of fun?

In comparison with these timeless traditions, today’s social games are hardly social. First and foremost, the people we play games with are typically not our entire social graph as defined by Facebook and other social networks. Sure, you may want to share restaurant preferences or parenting tips with your college classmates, but they probably don’t care about your progress in Farmville. We mostly end up playing social games alone, occasionally (or frequently) pinging others who may or may not care. Compare this to a raid with your WoW guild, or a heated weekly poker game, and you catch my drift.

Another post calling for more social in social games - much less concrete than Greg Costikyan's recent feature at Gamasutra (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6387/). Still, both are rallying for the school of social game design and development where the holy grail of 'truly' or 'more' social is sought via comparing the social exchanges of Facebook games to other forms of games.

I keep on insisting that you should not necessarily make that comparison to other 'more social' games (see last sentence in the quote above) - with Facebook in particular social is very much about the ambient social context, i.e. time and place, the concrete footings on where these games are played. If none of these games would not make money today, the rally for more social would be more relevant - for me, it always chimes as game developers wanting to mould a new game medium into the formats and idiosyncrasies they are comfortable with. People just don't get over the comparison compulsion I guess, or be able to bend their brains into seeing that sometimes, in a particular context, 'less' social can be more. It's a harder sell as well.

CivWorld is a game-changer for Facebook because it's truly social.

That sentence from the IGN writeup feels almost a parody of my earlier posts about the 'social' in social games, and the widely spread presumption that more 'games as we know them' social is better regardless of the platform and its context. Somebody should start tracking the list of social game failures based on this 'social envy' of game developers and gamers towards social games' (=Facebook games) superficial sociality. Nevertheless, hail the truism of truly social!

Another guy without a clue of the free to play model and social games business in general: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2011-05-11-social-gaming-will-crash-ver...

“The irony is that the future of social gaming will actually be social,” Shumaker said. “The evolution of social games is about game content and the mechanics that make interesting social game experiences. Content will move from clicks to storylines. We may require people to think.”

This from a RockYou exec talk, reported at Inside Social Games. The piece continues to quote that 'as social games evolve toward actual social experience...'. Fine, but there is an inherent assumption that at present games are not 'actually' social. This is reasoned to not being synchronous. To me, synchronous spells non-casual. Non-casual to me spells relative failure in this space.

'Actual' social seems to be the holy grail of game developers, but for me it smells like a trap, something game developers would like to see, without consulting the motivation and practices of social games audiences. If you want a more elaborate take on why I see that less social can be more, check out my recent Casual Connect talk here: http://casualconnect.org/lectures/community-social/state-of-social-in-social-...

Reynolds continued, "What I tell new game designers at Zynga to do, particularly the ones that come from the triple-A industry, is I say, 'Don't try to make a triple-A game and then try to figure out how to add the social into it. Make a social game and then figure out how to draw on your triple-A experience, to make it better, to make it more fun and more compelling. Those are the people that succeed - the people that come in and really learn social qua social and bring their immense decades of experience to improve it from there.

Brian Reynolds interview at Industry Gamers. Couldn't agree more. That shift is not necessarily easy though, one needs to be humble - and one cannot underestimate the challenge of designing for ultimate accessibility.

The bottom line is that social game developers have made a LOT of money creating games that you don’t enjoy, and you feel threatened and resentful (and perhaps a little jealous) because the games that are getting so much attention aren’t the ones you enjoy playing. Do you really think that convincing those Farmville-addicted moms to play a metroidvania platformer is the answer? How will you choose to articulate your feelings? i like collecting little lost cows, and you like shooting space demons in the head. Be very careful who you’re calling shallow.

Excellent blog post from Ryan Henson Creighton that manages to articulate the futility of social game hate and the issue of 'shallow' gameplay, whatever that means.