I didn’t attend GDC, unfortunately, but I felt like I was there with all the coverage it got. Maybe I’m just really wishing I could have gone. Here’s a sample of my favorite articles from a range of blogs. Sidebar: It’s interesting to see the way social games are treated in these conversations. A future post will focus on that, but that’s for another time.
Social Mechanics in (Social) Games, by VP of Creative Design at Playdom [http://bit.ly/i4GaKF]
Read this and you’ll never ask somebody if a game is “single player” again. A pretty awesome, massive powerpoint covering a lot of common sociological phenomenon, but highlighted in their gaming context. Details how games are designed to pit players against one another in competition for different kinds of resources, and then, at a more complex level, how tribes appear informally in a game with clans like every MMO ever. A perspective changing approach to me, but maybe this is common sense in the world of social game design. Has a Derrida quote which is cute and worth +1000 for me, though I’m not convinced the author has any idea what it means.
Brenda Brathwaite defends social games as games through their shared history of initial rejection [http://bit.ly/g7QeAC]
Hint: My future post on how social games are discussed will focus on a dichotomy I’ll preview here; the narrative is split, either social games are “games” or they aren’t, “games” meaning some sort of experience presumably on-par with mainstream offerings like Call of Duty and WoW. Ms. Brathwaite, a VP of something at Loot Drop, thinks they are, and compares it to the early games of yore that were met with backlash in the media and legislature as ruining our youth, before eventually earning enough to lobby that same legislature to shut up (This, we call democracy). Social games have earned their fair share of bashing in a similar narrative, and Brathwaite has had enough!
Another guy defends social games by cheating in a game and showering himself with silver coins (not a joke) [http://bit.ly/gm1f53]
A very humorous story of a small social game company founder who sorta cheated his way to getting a platform to make a speech, only to be told he couldn’t have it because he cheated. Either he is great on his toes or he had a speech prepared in anticipation of his disqualification (either way, brilliant), and his short rant represents the other meme in the social games debate: social games aren’t games, but they make bank so screw the haters.
danielmarkmiller.net 