作者：Neil Vidyarthi

Serious Business的《好友买卖》是罕有社交游戏类型，玩家的所有活动都同其社交圈密切相关，是款名副其实的“社交游戏”。游戏围绕朋友买卖，目标是拥有社交网络中最受欢迎的用户，实现利益最大化。下面我们来回顾游戏相关内容。

Friend for sale from joshuatj.com

游戏名称：《好友买卖》

游戏类型：社交策略型

游戏开发商：Serious Business

游戏发行商：Zynga

发行年份：2008年

总结：《好友买卖》尽管存有描述缺陷，但仍是Facebook最具社交性的游戏。

优点：有趣、奇妙的游戏引擎。蕴含大量幽默元素。各种活动都基于把好友当作宠物。

缺点：用户界面浏览不方便。过分简单的画面容易产生厌倦感。

全面评述

游戏玩法：

《好友买卖》通过朋友买卖实现利益最大化。你能够浏览好友的FFS（快速全扫描）个人资料，查看其现行成本（游戏邦注：当其被购买时成本增加，主动售出时成本降低）、昵称、所有者、爱慕者以及宠物等。

作为玩家，你能够获悉所有上述信息。你可以创造匿名意愿清单，让仰慕者知道你觉得他们很了不起，这会间接提高游戏角色的价值。你可以掏钱锁住宠物，这样就能确保它们在某段时间内不被偷走。加锁需耗费代币，这只能通过广告推广活动或现金购买。

Friend for Sale for allfacebook.com

《好友买卖》的一大优点是其游戏引擎始具有兼容性。游戏发行已有段时间，随后不断出现更新版本，引擎也不断得到强化，是首批获得病毒式传播的游戏，这是因为游戏世界的所有角色都是玩家社交圈当中的好友。游戏取得多次历史性发展，直至达到其当前360万的MAU（此数据系2010年3月24日标准）。2010年2月，Zynga以未公开价格收购了Serious Business。Zynga收购游戏后，游戏顶部添加了Zynga横幅，同时通过代币实现交易过程一体化。

游戏呈现方式：

《好友买卖》只有少量画面，完全没有音效。游戏主要通过静态画面（游戏邦注：主要是宠物及其相关信息）呈现，踢或刺之类的动作丝毫没有动态效果。用户界面有时略显杂乱，但就功能来说还是相当不错的。用户初次体验游戏时，会出现操作指南，告知他们如何进行体验，但这不过是个简短说明过程，只涉及最基本内容：高级玩家通常会在论坛中发问，深入探究某些游戏概念。

持久吸引力：

游戏的特别之处在于其具有持久吸引力。游戏完全依托你的社交圈，这意味着你的所有社交活动都含有社交元素。不论是让好友踢另一好友（他是你宠物），还是浏览好友市场，看看谁最有价值，这些活动都和你的社交圈密切相关。这意味着若你开始游戏，沉浸其中1个礼拜，那么好友让你刺杀某个敌人，或某人以你反对的价格将你售出，都会促使你回访游戏。整个游戏能有此天然幽默氛围要归功于趣味横生的体验环境，这是游戏能够维持长久魅力的原因所在。

游戏社交性：

就像在持久吸引力部分中提到的，游戏具有社交性的原因在于所有角色都来自你的社交圈。社交游戏同标准休闲游戏的区别在于前者借助社交圈（游戏邦注：也就是现实世界的好友），游戏发展以此作为基础。若游戏依托独立游戏网站，其中好友不过是疏远的游戏玩伴，就无法取得如此成功：玩家买卖好友就无法获得相应社交利益。但在这款游戏中，玩家可以购买未参与游戏的角色，如（外）祖父母，这说明游戏具有真正社交性，且通俗易懂。

Orphan from socialtimes.com

玩家能够在自己的页面发出公开请求，这说明游戏真正参与至现实世界当中。从上图可以看出，我公开请求他人收养我，这在游戏世界中行得通，但在实现世界就很滑稽，这使游戏区别于其他幻想类型。

游戏邦注：原文发布于2010年3月24日，文章涉及数据以当时为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Game Review: Friends for Sale Is Still The Most Social Game

By 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.（Source：socialtimes）