社交游戏开发商Playdom副总裁Raph Koster本周在旧金山举办的游戏开发者大会(GDC)上发表演讲，以下是游戏邦编译的专栏作家Tadhg Kelly对所陈述观点的深度评论：

睿智的Raph Koster在2月28日的GDC上对所谓的“社交机制”进行陈述，话题包括在社交游戏中发生的普通社交行为以及社交结构或游戏设计的潜在创新能力，这些还未发掘的潜能或许可供开发者使用。由于Raph曾在Playdom公司待过，对社交游戏和社交结构了解较多，因此他时常发表自己在游戏设计上的看法，尤其是社交在网络游戏中的应用。

我未曾出席GDC，所以觉得自己对此发表评论或许更有意义。我审视其观点的核心部分，发现Raph的演讲主要围绕着合作游戏，随后提出这种方式是否适用于社交游戏领域的问题。在下文中，我将阐述某些演讲可能遗漏的观点。最后我会探讨相关问题，社交与游戏间的融合是否还能够进一步加深。

Raph Koster

第一印象

我不喜欢“社交机制”的说法，这个词对每个人的含义各不相同，因此它可能指代游戏中的很多事物。在某些不开发游戏的非专业人士看来，机制或许只是销售术语。所幸Raph在演讲中探讨独特销售要点时，听众都是投资商，因此所有人都可以理解他所要表达的意思。

从销售角度而言，我能够理解为何Raph会使用“社交机制”这个词。事实上，它并不指代游戏的方方面面，尤其对游戏制作者而言。也就是说，演讲主题可以归纳如下：1、调查游戏中的社交结构；2、审视究竟是什么在社交游戏中发挥作用；3、思考为何某些游戏会如此运转；4、游戏中某些普遍发生的行为。演讲稿的副标题是“多人游戏背后的驱动力”，探索从单人游戏过渡到各种不同的合作性或竞争性多人游戏的途径。

我发觉Raph格外强调多人游戏。我通过诸多途径（大部分在Twitter上）获悉，开发者和玩家认为社交游戏发展的下个阶段就是提高玩家间的联系。自马克·平卡斯（Mark Pincus，Zynga创建者）以下所有游戏开发者都在谈论增加游戏中社交内容，但是如果观察那些在Facebook上发布的游戏就会发现，几乎没多少适合多人参与。

几乎每款成功的社交游戏都是并行游戏，仅仅是单人游戏的变体而已。社交在这些并行游戏中最典型的运用在于开发商纯粹以此来鼓励玩家花更多时间。如果让我分析《CityVille》，要理解以这款游戏为背景的社交行为，关键在于认识到这些游戏中以自我为中心的社交行为。游戏只是把社交网络化而并非注重朋友间的互动，每个人都有自己的计划。

迄今为止，成功的社交游戏无非都是玩家独自玩，随后允许玩家间有些许合作以便他们能够继续。《德州扑克》是少数几款风格不同的游戏，但是与单人游戏的差别也不是很大。《德州扑克》允许玩家极快地参与或离开游戏，虽然玩家都是跟陌生人对决，但事实上整个游戏的要点无非就是玩家独自努力赚取大量筹码。虽然《德州扑克》看似多人游戏，其实它也只是角色扮演游戏的变体而已。

这些问题让我产生如下疑问：所讨论的在社交游戏中融入更多社会性或多人游戏行为是否确实是用户所关心的问题，抑或仅仅是传统游戏设计师想当然而已。社交游戏是否真正等同于“团队游戏”？Facebook是否真正关心游戏中的互动？我们是否还有必要去听那些解释为何需要把社交游戏变为多人游戏或家庭桌游的言论呢？这些正是Raph的演讲给我带来的问题。

Poker

游戏中的同步性

下面，我引用演讲中的语句简单介绍下Raph所关注的话题：“首先，好游戏必须全面关注其单人成分。如果只是类似射击类或竞赛类的简单游戏，那么团队可以用剩余的时间和设计尺度来填充多人游戏的内容。换句话说，多人游戏离不开单人游戏，纯粹的多人游戏极为少见。”

这些言论奠定了Raph演讲的基调，随后他开始为单人游戏下定义。最初，他再三强调道：游戏设计的目的并非只是为了使玩家与其他玩家对立或共存，他的想法正可以合理描述目前的社交游戏。随后他对这个言论加以扩展：游戏设计的目的并非只是为了使玩家与其他玩家对立、共存或合作。

Raph主要是想说明，单人社交游戏的玩家在游戏过程中与朋友间有某些交叉点，而且这种交叉点可以比我们目前所看到的更多，存在发展的潜力。Raph审视社交游戏领域中玩家间存在的联系，并研究了为何像《魔兽世界》之类多人游戏的玩家间协作较强的原因，在二者中找到共通点。

他认为共通点在于可以逐步消除各类游戏间的界限。游戏并非以规则划分类别，起决定作用的是可能合理影响到游戏可玩性的事物。Raph以培训为例，我认为他指的是玩家学习游戏玩法的过程以及游戏试玩。但是，我认为这个例子可信度不高。如果我们承认培训是游戏的一部分但不属于游戏内容，那么像协作性之类的不也与之类似。

反之，我不认为培训可以作为游戏间的界限。玩家学习新的卡牌游戏时，在真正开始玩之前通常都需要试玩一轮。此举确保玩家能够理解这个游戏世界的框架，在真正开始游戏时能够建立适当的因果关系和胜负感。指导性试玩可以将玩家带入游戏世界中，可作为游戏的缓冲剂。只有这种缓冲剂真正发挥作用时，玩家才有可能全身心投入游戏中。

我还认为，理解社交游戏中的社交成分并非可以此来推断游戏的其他因素。因为一种界定因素易变并不意味着其他因素也是如此，在这里使用三段论毫无意义。

我的定义如下：1、单人游戏是指玩家在游戏中独自与系统对抗；2、并行游戏是单人游戏的变体，允许玩家间能够适当帮助对方；3、合作游戏是单人游戏的团队化变体，允许玩家间的大范围合作；4、多人游戏是指玩家或团队可以在游戏中短期内与他人对抗；5、竞赛游戏是指玩家或团队在游戏中长期与他人比拼。

Facebook上也有并行游戏、多人游戏和竞赛游戏。《CityVille》属于并行游戏、《德州扑克》是多人游戏，《宝石迷阵：闪电战》应归于竞赛游戏。平台上也有单人游戏，但是很少吸引玩家的注意，而合作游戏几乎没有。

Raph似乎考虑过这是社交网络的不足之处，我觉得他已经认识到这个缺陷，但是我并不认同合作游戏在社交网络上普及的可行性。Facebook建立在异步性的基础上，这就是为何个人玩家间的些许合作尚属可行，但是玩家间却很难有更深层次的协作，因为这要求玩家间具有同步性。如果某个大型怪物需25个玩家合作才能打倒，那么这些人势必要同时发动攻击，这种更深层次的用户实时参与是目前Facebook办不到的。甚至连某些Facebook自有的希望能够加深用户参与度的特性都无法发挥作用，那么需要更深层次合作的多人游戏如何能在这样的平台中繁衍生息呢？

CityVille

“社交游戏中可能涉及的40种社交机制”中的几项

泛谈社交游戏后，Raph提及其演讲的核心话题。在这里我不对每种机制进行评述，只探讨某些自己有更深见解或不同意见的内容：

竞速：可能包含赛跑或争夺目标的桌游。据他所述，这并不属于社交游戏范畴。但是我觉得真正原因在于同步性是竞速游戏的要素之一。

竞赛：我们可以在游戏竞赛中发现很有趣的现象，竞技程度越深，用户反而越少。Popcap公司开发的《宝石迷阵：闪电战》只属于小型竞赛，他们鼓励游戏玩家在一个星期时间内争取获得最高的分数。然而，内涵更深的足球经营竞赛游戏《Soccer Stars Football》的用户反倒很少。我觉得这可能是因为竞赛的金字塔形结构，使得处于下层的玩家无意继续参赛。

摘花、吃豆和拔河：通过对游戏中此类内容的调查发现，对于其在游戏中如何发挥作用，玩家和开发者的意见各不相同。这也使我很好奇Facebook里是否有多人版《Amidar》的一席之地。

生存：这种内容才是同步性在游戏中的恰当应用。无论是即时或回合制游戏，同步性还从未在Facebook上体现出来。《Scrabulous》新奇的模式确实很受欢迎，但是《Lexulous》的用户数量就不那么乐观，即使是《Scrabble》也只能勉强维持每月200万的活跃用户数量。

竞价：Raph认为，似乎不会有游戏涉及缄默拍卖。但是我们从eBay的经验得知，缄默竞价确实很有效。或许制作出与实物竞价有所关联的游戏会受到玩家的欢迎。

欺骗：Raph提及可设计成游戏的各种欺骗、虚张声势或某些适当的形式。但是，实时效应是这一切的基础，即同步性。像《狼人》（一款杀人游戏）等游戏之所以能够顺利运营，是因为游戏将所有玩家设计在同一个房间中。然而，回合制以及长时间的等待使玩家大量流失，间隔的时间也给玩家提供作弊的机会。

礼物：有趣的是，Facebook游戏中送礼系统所涉及的礼物并非是在玩家间传递，玩家送给他人的礼物并非是自己所有的东西。创造出这种模式很简单，而且这种方法消除了系统带来的消极副作用，玩家可以在顾及自己利益的同时施惠于他人。如果礼物是在玩家间传递，那么这个系统或许就无法有效运转，因为这需要玩家间的关系足以弥补物品上的损失。Raph试图说明玩家间索求礼物和玩家将自己的物品赠予他人无异，所以事实上所有的赠礼行为都会有损失，但是我觉得目前的系统还较为合理。现在的送礼系统希望能够向玩家表明，比起礼物自身的价值而言，其社交内涵更有意义，但事实上系统纯粹只是鼓励玩家花更多时间玩游戏。

互惠：玩家意识到礼物是免费的，这使得送礼行为更易发生。这使我很好奇，《CityVille》的玩家是否会组成联盟来应对游戏中的能源需求。我认为Raph对发生回赠行为考虑得过于复杂。比起现实中的朋友而言，社交网络上的朋友并不那么看重互惠。因此要使互惠生根发芽，社交网络必须让玩家觉得送这些免费的礼物可以不付出任何代价。也就是说，社交网络希望玩家能够频繁交往并最终成为真正的朋友，但是这种情况却很少发生。绝大部分的互惠行为仅仅只是利益的驱动。

排斥异己：《德州扑克》中的排斥异己行为可能针对接近破产的玩家，使他们丧失最后的竞争机会。而且，这种内容的存在还可以使那些最优秀的玩家除去自己的对手，统治整个游戏。但是，这种机制的存在可能引发玩家流失等问题。

信任：在合作游戏和团队多人游戏中，信任是基础。但现在，设计的多人游戏中玩家间的信任度大打折扣，大部分单人游戏完全忽略了这个方面。我认为之所以会发生这种状况，归根结底还是同步性的问题。

贸易和合同：这些内容还未曾出现在社交游戏中，这令我感到惊奇，因为许多MMO游戏中已出现玩家间的贸易。依我来看，这是Raph提出的所有观点中最为透彻的一点。

选举：或许这个东西会出现在游戏中，但是我觉得不能以《美国偶像》来作为例证，因为它并非游戏。当然，政治性游戏也不算对这种系统的绝佳运用。竞选类游戏的问题在于，对大部分玩家而言，他们只能在投票后等待胜负结果。这也是为何大部分政治性游戏更加关注选举过程的原因。

名誉：只有与看客或其他玩家已经关注的内容建立起联系时，名誉才真正起到作用。虽然奥巴马贵为美国总统，但是青少年更喜欢的还是贾斯汀·比伯。在《黑帮战争》中升到50级并没有什么意义，因为这与其他事物没有任何关系。这种与现实关联性的缺乏导致许多游戏失败，只有在内容和主题上加以扩展才能吸引玩家。

Mafia Wars

社区：目前许多游戏中的玩家已经组成社区，这比游戏在该内容的设计上快速得多。《德州扑克》的内涵在于竞价和玩家间互相猜疑，这会吸引某些类型的玩家并形成独特的游戏文化。而《Belote》风格与之不同，也会吸引其他玩家群体参与。

战略指导和团队协作：我对这个观点的看法上文已经提过。ARG（侵入式虚拟现实互动游戏）本质上是合作游戏，但是存在严重的传播问题，团队协作则是上文提过的许多观点的基础。然而，团队协作的产生势必需要同步性存在。

社交游戏是否还有发展空间

Raph正在探索社交游戏的发展方向，他也必须这样做。因为几乎没有游戏设计人员只想停留在设计《德州扑克》或其他城市模拟游戏。但我发现，目前进行的围绕社交游戏设计的探讨不太切合实际。确实，社交结构的形式多种多样，了解其功能也可能让人有所启发。但是让我们退一步，看看Facebook上的那些游戏。

某些主流公司制作出相当普通的游戏，从用户手中骗取钱财，提供的却只是停留在娱乐层面的游戏形式。但是，这些缺乏创意的游戏告诉我们，理论上还有空间可以设计出令人惊奇的内容。Facebook就像电视机，平台运营的方式造就了某些收视率特别高的频道，其他小公司只能争抢剩余的些许用户。如果保持这种状况，那么许多长期运营的游戏势必会在数年内高居榜首，其他游戏突出重围构成威胁的情况相当罕见。这样看来，像iPhone之类的其他平台的创新性似乎更强。

这让我不得不说，虽然理论上社交游戏和社交结构很吸引人，但是Facebook目前存在的问题却有碍创新。我对社交游戏领域研究越深，越觉得正是Facebook缺乏对有趣应用程序的发掘导致那些Raph认为应该出现的更具挑战性的观点不曾得以实施。

《A Wall of Eryx》正朝社交游戏的未来发展，如此缓慢的速度应归咎于Facebook。因而，Raph以及许多著名游戏专家在GDC这些天分享的社交结构理论并不会引起开发者的注意。发现问题是马克·扎克伯格正在考虑的事情，但更重要的是如何解决这些问题。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Social Games vs Multiplayer Games: A Commentary on Raph Koster’s Social Mechanics Presentation

Guest columnist Tadhg Kelly has an in-depth review, below, covering a presentation recently given by veteran game developer Raph Koster at the Game Developers Conference happening this week in San Francisco.

The excellent Raph Koster delivered a long presentation (190 slides) at GDC on Monday on what he called social mechanics. The presentation covered topics such as common social actions that occur in social games and potential innovations in social structure or gameplay that developers could adopt. Raph often delivers talks about game design issues – especially as they apply to online gaming – and since he has been at Playdom for a while, social games and social structures have very much been on his mind. The slides are presented in a PDF on his site, which makes them quite hard to read, but they are well worth digesting.

I thought that since I’m not at GDC, it might be interesting to write a review-from-afar. I looked at the core of his ideas, many of which center around cooperative gameplay, then raised questions over whether they were appropriate to the social game space. Below, I suggest some alternatives that may have been missed in the presentation, and finally I ask whether social games have a next level of sophistication to them at all.

Initial Impressions

I dislike the term game mechanic. It means anything to anyone, and so it tends to represent only a very loose umbrella of things that happen in games. From an informal perspective (i.e. someone who doesn’t make games), mechanic is just a sales term. You use it in presentations with investors along with discussing your unique selling points, and everybody thinks they understand what you mean.

So from a sales perspective, I understand why Raph might use the word social mechanic but it doesn’t actually mean anything, especially not to game makers. What the presentation actually covers is:

Observations on social structures in games
Musings on what might work in social games
Thoughts on why some games work the way they do
Some common action types in games

The presentation is subtitled ‘The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer’ and traces a path from single player games through to different kinds of collaborative or competitive multiplayer gaming.

I find the emphasis on multiplayer odd. In a number of places (Twitter mostly) I’m reading opinions from developers and players that the next stage of social game development is great connection between players. Everyone from Mark Pincus on down has talked about increasing the social dimensions in their games, but if you actually look at the games that work on Facebook, practically none of them are multiplayer.

Pretty much every successful social game is a parallel game (a variant of the single player game). The typical uses of social aspects in parallel games is purely incentive-driven. As I wrote about in my analysis of CityVille, the key to understanding social in this context is to realize that these games are selfishly social. They’re like a networking event rather than friends hanging out: Everybody has an agenda.

The core of successful social game design thus far has been to focus on the player playing her game effectively alone, and then allowing light, incentive-driven collaboration. Poker is pretty much the only exception to this, and is not even that much of an exception. Poker lets players join and leave tables very quickly, and although they are playing against strangers, the game is actually about building stacks of chips. It is played multiplayer, but in effect Poker is only one remove away from any other role-playing game.

This makes me wonder whether the discussion around bringing more socializing and multiplayer activity to social games is actually a problem that users have, or whether it’s a gap that classical game designers think they see. Should social gaming really mean ‘group play’? Do Facebook users actually care about that kind of interaction? Are we to hear endless riffs on why social gaming needs to be multiplayer and analogies about family board games? These are the sorts of questions that Raph’s presentation bring to mind.

Synchrony

A brief introduction to the presentation topic is followed by an opening quote: ‘A good game should focus entirely on it’s single-player aspect first and foremost. Then if it’s a simple game like a shooter or racer, use the remaining time and space to fit in a multi-player aspect to it… In other words, multi-playing should never take away from the single-player aspect of the game. Pure multi-player games really should be few and far between.’

This sets the stage. Raph then proceeds to define single player games. Repeatedly. He starts with: A game that is not played in opposition to, or in parallel with, someone else. (which he thinks describes social games today)

But expands to: A game that is not played in opposition to, or in parallel with, or collaboratively with, someone else. (Which is where he thinks the opportunity lies)

What Raph is basically saying is that a single player social game is played by yourself, but with some crossover to your friends, and he thinks that there is much more potential to be had with that crossover than what we’ve seen so far. Raph is seeing the connections that exist between gamers in the social game space, and then looking at how multiplayer games like World of Warcraft are much more collaborative, and drawing a line between the two.

He draws this line by looking at the mutability of game boundaries. A game is not bounded by its rules, but by anything that can legally affect the gameplay. Training is an example that he gives, by which I think he means either learning to play or practising. If we can accept that training is ‘in game’ but not ‘of game’ then it follows that other things like collaboration are ‘in game’ but not ‘of game’ too. That, I think, is tenuous.

On the one hand, I don’t agree that training is within the boundary of the game. When learning to play a new card game, players will often play a practice round before they play ‘for real’. The implication is that the frame of the world is being understood, but once the real game is on then consequences and sense of win or loss will start to be applied. Dummy-play, guided-play (such as the intro to My Vineyard) and so forth are the introduction into the game world, but they are done so with stabilizers. The full engagement with a game only really happens when the stabilizers come off.

I also think that doesn’t really mean anything when it comes to understanding the social component of social games. Just because one kind of boundary is mutable doesn’t mean that the other is also, so the syllogism doesn’t really stack up.

My own definitions would be:

A single player game is a game that a player plays against a game system alone.
A parallel game is a variant of single play, allowing single players to mildly assist each other.
A cooperative game is a team variant of single play which allows players to majorly assist each other.
A multiplayer game is a game in which players (or teams) oppose one another in short bursts.
A tournament game is a game in which players (or teams) oppose each other over extended periods.

Parallel, multiplayer and tournament games are all represented on Facebook. CityVille is a parallel game, Poker is a multiplayer game and Bejewelled Blitz is a tournament. Single player games exist on the platform but seriously struggle to gain traction, and co-operative games are largely absent.

Raph seems to think that co-operative games are the missing link. I see what he’s getting at, but I’m not convinced that it’s feasible. The Facebook experience is built on asynchrony, which is why light collaboration between single players works, but deep collaboration between players pretty much requires synchrony. If 25 people are going to take down the big demon, then we need to be coordinating their attack in real time, but that’s a deeper and more full-screen kind of engagement than Facebook normally generates. Even many of Facebook’s own advanced features which try to build deeper engagement don’t seem to really take off, so how would deeper multiplayer games fare in those waters?

Some of the 40 Things that Could Happen in Social Games

After the opening discussion, Raph gets into the meat of the presentation. I won’t go through each and every slide, but some I found insightful or disagreeable were:

Races: This might mean a physical race or a winning-goal board game. They are, as he notes, absent from social games. Arguably I’d say this is because synchrony is a factor in race games.

Tournaments: One of the interesting things about tournaments is that the deeper they become, the fewer users they typically have. The Blitz games from Popcap are light tournaments, for example, in that they encourage players to compete for high scores within a week-length time-frame. However the deep football management game Soccer Stars Football has always had only a small audience. I think this is because tournaments form pyramidal structures, and pyramids discourage lower class players from participating (but are great for spectators).

Flower Picking, Dot Eating and Tug of War: The interesting observation here is the different perceptions over how they work between players and developers. It also led me to wonder whether there is room in Facebook for a multiplayer version of Amidar.

Last Man Standing: This is where we start to properly get into synchrony. Whether in real time or turn-based games, synchrony has never scaled well on Facebook. Scrabulous was certainly popular as a novelty, but Lexulous has miserable user numbers and even the official Scrabble games can barely manage 2m MAU between them.

Bidding: Raph notes that no game seems to use silent auctions. And yet we know from eBay that silent bidding is phenomenally powerful. Is it perhaps something to do with the tangible aspect of bidding for real things that makes a game like this work?

Deception: Raph talks about several kinds of deception, bluffing and moderated experiences. Each of these relies on a live effect, i.e. synchrony territory. Games like Werewolf only work because people are in the room, whereas turn-based or long-wait versions (like various forum PBEM versions) tend to experience a lot of player fall-off. Time gaps also give players a lot of opportunity to cheat.

Gifts: The interesting thing about gifting in Facebook games is that it often doesn’t involve transfer. The gift I send to another player does not come out of my stash. The game simply invents it. This means that parallel play has no negative side-effects, and so players can be selfishly social and good for each other at the same time. What doesn’t work as well is if gifts involve transfer. If they do, then they require a social connection to overcome the loss of stash. Raph tries to say that the gift request is analogous to stash, and so all gifts are actually not free, but I think that’s a rationalization. It tries to prove that gifts are more genuinely social than they actually are, but the reality is they function best purely as incentives.

Reciprocity: The realization that gifts are a source of free stuff then make sending gifts easy (which leads me to wonder whether any player syndicates have formed in CityVille to overcome the punitive Energy requirement). I think Raph is over-analyzing why re-gifting happens though. Reciprocity is not a social expectation among friendlies (most of your Facebook graph) as it is with actual friends (the minority). So for reciprocity to work it really has to have the ‘no-skin-off-my-nose’ quality that free gifts entail. The implication is that the game is bringing friendlies closer together and turning them into friends, but that only happens rarely. Most of the time, reciprocity has a pure profit motive.

Ostracism: Ostracism in Poker could be deliberately near-bankrupting a player so that they cannot bid any more. However, ostracism is also a perfect vector for optimal players to exclude opponents and otherwise game the game system (as it were), and so it has problems when it comes to trying to encourage player retention.

Trust: Cooperative games rely on trust, as do team-based multiplayer games. Outside of that, multiplayer games are deliberately built to either discourage trust, and most single player games are built to ignore the need for it either way. So while it’s an interesting observation, both of these are (I think) still coming back to that issue of requiring synchrony.

Trade and Contract: What surprises me is that these do not already exist in social games. Many MMOs already have player-to-player economies. For me, this is the most insightful of all Raph’s slides.

Elections: Perhaps this could work, although I think American Idol is not a great example because it isn’t actually a game. Nor is politics. The problem with electioneering is that for most of the players they only have one action (vote) and after that they win or lose. This is why most political games tend to focus much more on process.

Reputation: Reputation only matters if it’s in relation to something that viewers or other players already care about. Bieber fever relates to teenage girls and their boy mania, while Barack Obama is the President of the United States. On the other hand being Level 50 in Mafia Wars means nothing to nobody because it is not related to anything other than the player themselves. This lack of relevance is a critical failing of many achievement schemes, and so the better kind of reward to give a player is an extension.

Communities: These are more outcomes rather than designed. Because the game of Poker is built on bidding and suspicion, it will attract some kinds of players and so a culture around the game will have a certain character. On the other hand, Belote is a different kind of game and will attract a different crowd.

Strategy Guides and Teamwork: Arguably these are repeats of earlier ideas. ARGs are essentially cooperative games but they have serious scale problems, while teamwork is implied as a layer for most of the other ideas above. Teamwork tends to need synchrony though.

Is There a Next Level for Social Games?

Raph is reaching for the next level, and so he should. Few are the game designers whose only ambition is to create Poker or yet another city simulator, and boundaries exist to be pushed upon. And yet at the same time, I feel that much of the design talk currently floating around social games (and gamification) are a bit flaky. It’s true that there are many kinds of social structure and it is possible to get very excited about what it might mean, but take a step back and look at what we actually see on Facebook.

A few dominant companies that make fairly ordinary games that coax some amount of virality out of their users and provide amusement-level entertainment. While there is certainly space for amazing things to be happening there in theory, the striking ordinariness of the games is telling. Facebook seems to be much like television, in that the way the platform works results in a few very top-heavy channels, with many other smaller companies scrambling for a little bit of the juice that the big boys get. In such a landscape, many long-running games have sat on top of the tree for a couple of years. There are very few breakout hits, and other platforms like the iPhone are much more active on the innovation front.

This leads me to say that while social games and social structures are interesting in theory, Facebook’s visibility problem is discouraging that innovation from happening. The more that I work in the social games space, the more I think Facebook’s lack of dedicated editorial to assist discovery of interesting apps is a primary reason why many of the more adventurous ideas that Raph thinks should be there are not there.

A Wall of Eryx stands between where social games are and what the next level could be, and it’s Facebook’s fault. The theories of social structure that Raph and many other great guys are sharing these days are thus unattractive to developers. Discovery is a problem that’s sitting in Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox, and the real question is what is he going to do about it? (Source: Inside Social Games)