Social Gaming Dynamics: Same Rules Online and Offline!

The June session of the Facebook Developer Garage in London took place yesterday and as the title of this post suggests the core topic was gaming: how you can use games to invite people to interact and to engage with your brand/website through games on social media, but more generally, through games. A couple of things kept coming up during this event, regardless whether it was from the speakers or chats with other participants.

When Iskandar Najmuddin from Nudge explained the recent innovations on the network (vanity URL; Facebook currency; verified apps and new directory; the bug tracker system; real time search; release of the API for events), the one thing that struck my mind was how Facebook is still completely obsessed with Twitter. After the recent changes made to the newsfeed, they now concentrate on real-time search and have launched an “everyone button” that makes your updates completely public.

However, yesterday I understood the complex that Facebook has as I began to spontaneously mention Twitter games and realized how responsive people were. I guess if I was working for Facebook, I would be a bit annoyed that Twitter got mentioned all the time.

But getting back to the heart of the topic, here is what I feel were the most interesting points brought forward by the different speakers:

• Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO and co-founder of TrustedPlaces, explained how his company used games to attract people on the website and to create word of mouth around their business. He took the example of the Beerdex, a game they launched a couple of months ago that invites people to indicate price of beers wherever they know it. It ended up bringing traffic to the website and engaging people in a unique way. He explained that these games last for a couple days maybe weeks and then they have to renew them to entice new potential users.

• Karl Bunyan, a developer from SocialCash, detailed his work on one of his Facebook applications, SoccerStars. One of the points that seemed highly important to me is that, you must give people a reason why they have to share it with their friends. Even if users tend to share things with their network, they don’t do it in a spontaneous manner, which means you have to build a reward system or any form of incentive that will push them to do so.

• Sam Mathews, founder of Fnatic and gamer himself, put forward the fact that “you need to keep it fresh”: regardless what your game is about, you have to bring new dimensions and original elements to it in order to keep users engaged.

• Holly Gramazio, game designer for Sandpit, explained that one of the points she has to consider when creating an event is that people get bored easily: they are annoyed if they play a game that seems too common or if the rules are too complicated to understand, so you need to find a balance between novelty and simplicity.

Overall, what comes up from this Facebook Garage event is that games are a powerful way to reach and engage people, but that the same rules apply both online and offline: be creative, place the social element at the heart of it, bring novelty as much as possible but keep things simple.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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