我们将观察的游戏是社交网络中的好友买卖。该游戏主要是围绕社交网络平台中的好友进行买卖并获得最大化的价值收益。

名称：好友买卖（Friends for Sale ）

类型：社交网络游戏，策略游戏

开发商：Serious Business

发行公司：Zynga

发布时间：2008年

游戏玩法：

围绕好友买卖进行收益最大化。你可以去浏览你的好友的资料设置，你就能够了解到他们当前的花费（每次买入都会增加、每次卖出都会相应减少）、他们的昵称、他们的所有者、他们的追随者和他们的个人宠物等等。

好友买卖能如此盛行不衰，最为核心的法宝是他们把好友本身变成了商品，这驱动了玩家持久的游戏兴趣。就目前来讲，它仍然能够维持在每月360万独立玩家的高度。

好友买卖（friends for sale）

游戏介绍：

好友买卖的图表结构是简单的，更不用说连声音也没有了。虽然有时间用户界面会看起来有点杂乱，但是总体来讲，它的功能是很棒的。当你首次使用该游戏的时候，你将得到系列的游戏指导，但是这样的指导仅限于初级玩家，对于高级玩家来讲，他们就不得不发帖去询问相关的概念了。

本文原始作者：Neil Vidyarthi

Serious Business’ Friends For Sale is one of those rare games where every action you take relates to your social graph, and thereby lives up to the mantle of a ’social game’. The game revolves around buying and selling your friends with the goal of owning the most popular people in your social network to maximize profits. We review the game below.

* Title: Friends For Sale
* Genres: Social, Strategy
* Game Developer: Serious Business
* Game Publisher: Zynga
* Released: 2008

Summary:

Friends for Sale, despite its presentation shortcomings, provides one of the most social gaming experiences available on Facebook.

Pros:

Fun, quirky game engine.  Lots of humor.  Variety of activities to do with your friends as pets.

Cons:

Difficult to navigate the user interface.  Simplistic graphics can get boring.

Full Review:

Gameplay:

Friends for Sale revolves around buying and selling your friends to maximize your profits.  You can browse to look at any of your friends’ FFS profiles and view their current cost (which increases each time they are bought and decreases if they are manually put on sale), their nicknames, their owners, their admirers, their own pets, and more.

All these actions are available to you, as a player as well.  You can create an anonymous wishlist which will let your crush know that you think they’re awesome, and this indirectly raises the value of a certain person within the game.  You can give your pets nicknames, which is one of the funnier aspects of the game.  You can lock some of your pets at a cost, so that they won’t be stolen for a set period of time.  Locking, of course, costs tokens which are only purchased by doing offers or using real money.

One of the best things about Friends for Sale is the consistent game engine.  The game has been around for a while and has iterated and solidified its engine as the game has progressed.  It was one of the first games to spread virally, a large part of that being the fact that every piece within the game world is in fact a friend on your social graph.  This led to the tremendous growth in several waves until it reached its current user base of 3.6 million monthly active users. Following this, Zynga acquired Serious Business for an undisclosed amount in February of this year. When Zynga purchased the game, they added the Zynga bar to the top of the game, but also streamlined the monetization procedure with tokens.

Presentation:

Friends for Sale has very minimal graphics, and no sounds to speak of.  The presentation is mainly done through static screens that display your pets and their information, and actions like kicking or poking don’t have any animations.  The user interface itself can feel a bit cluttered at times, but is functionally good.  When first users start a game, they are given a tutorial which explains how to play the game, but it is a very short explanation that glosses over the basics: advanced users will probably find themselves asking questions at the forum to understand some of the concepts in the game.

Lasting Appeal:

The whole reason this game is special is its lasting appeal.  The entire game uses your social graph, and this means that every activity in the game has a social component.  Whether you’re getting your friend (who is your pet) to kick another friend of yours, or scanning the friend market to see who has the highest value, these actions all relate to your real social graph.  This means that once you’ve made your first moves and had a week of fun with the game, you’ll likely get sucked back in when a friend of yours either makes you poke a frenemy of yours, or somebody sells you off at a price you object to.  The whole game has this natural level of humor, because of the fun situations that real people get into, and this is what makes the game last.
Sociability:

As mentioned in lasting appeal, this game is social because every piece is from your social graph.  Looking at what separates social games from standard casual games, it’s only the use of the social graph (aka your real-life friends) that separates it, and this game thrives based on it.  This game would not succeed nearly as much if it were to be played in a disparate game site where your friends lists are remote game-only buddies that you just met: you wouldn’t get the social benefit from owning and selling them.  But the fact that you can buy players that don’t even HAVE the game, like your grandparents, for instance means that the game is truly social, and easy to access.

Also, the fact that you can make public requests on your page means the game really can come out into the real world.  In the above image, we can see me publicly requesting someone to adopt me, and that makes sense in the game world but is hilarious in the real world, and that’s what sets the game apart from other fantasy based games.

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