Earlier this week, I discovered, via mynintendonews.com, a comment by Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of partnerships, which somewhat surprised and alarmed me.
“Social design inside social gaming has driven fantastic growth.”
Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. Facebook is, after all, used by all kinds of people, even by those who wouldn't usually refer to themselves as gamers. Even by people who wouldn't usually refer to themselves as casual gamers.
More recently, I have come across this comment made by Minecraft Mastermind, Notch, speaking about the term 'Free to Play' and the implications it has for the games that use it.
Think about all the kinds of Facebook games which take this approach. It's not as if Facebook is innovating with a select few, there's all kinds of opportunities to make money. Meanwhile, social gamers grow virtual plants, cook virtual meals, decorate the walls to their virtual home.
And what's most surprising about all of this, I think, is how anti-social it all seems to be. Most of the time, player interaction through Facebook games were, in my mind -and back when I was addicted to stuff like this-, ways of taking advantage, of getting closer toward winning virtual medals so that you could show your accomplishments on a virtual space.
If Notch's creation, Minecraft itself is an argument against social gaming, it is a good one.
