Social Gaming - Making it Better

I'm not a fan of the current crop of social games, because they just smack of lazy / copycat game design. Most off all however, they aren't taking advantage of their single biggest USP - the social network. In fact, some of these games are actually on the fringes of being immoral - after reading an article in Edge about the comparison of these games to drugs, not sure I agree 100% with the conclusion, but certainly they are designed to use behavioral conditioning and peer pressure.

So rather than act like a virus and attempt to spread as far and wide as possible, I got to thinking about how you could actually make a game that uses the social network itself, rather than abuse the network as it seems to do currently.

Before we delve into the potential for connectivity, we must understand the platform itself. Whilst a standard multiplayer experience with everyone playing against each other at the same time could be possible on Facebook, the drop in, drop out nature of the platform makes such games difficult to organize. This is why turn based games, or co-operative suggestion works better. So with this in mind, we can think about prior examples of where this has worked really well.

Asymmetric Multiplayer
One intriguing type of multiplayer that could work really well with large groups of people, is an asymmetric design - that is where one or more players have different goals to the others.

For example - imagine a spy game, where the other players had to determine who the spy was. This could easily be envisioned as a Who-Dunnit mystery like the board game Clue.

Then there's the Games Master paradigm, where one of the players controls the experience for the other players. This can fit very neatly into the social structure - certainly there are probably plenty of D&D styles of game on Facebook already, but it wouldn't be too hard to tailor this to a more mainstream audience.

Augmented Reality Games
Another great aspect of the platform is its embedded nature in our lives. Now so many users have Facebook, etc on their phones, they tend to use these devices to check in to various real world locations. What if we took advantage of that with our games?

Take for example Geocaching. Here people use the GPS to find real-world caches of treasure. We could easily make these virtual caches, and set riddles, puzzles, etc for people to solve as they check in to various places - this could easily tie into discount promotions at stores to allow a possible source of revenue.

Social Engineering
What if we use the social network literally - what if we had a political game where you had to lobby people and get them to vote for you? Some kind of virtual government. You could even tie this into a Sim City style game, so we could create a series of interlinked games that are tailored to the respective tastes of different people - one person could be the urban planner, whilst their citizens play their own political games within the city, which in turn provides challenges for the city planner.