Early each and every day, tens of millions of facebook farmers all over the globe wake in order to toil inside their virtual plots of land in Farmville. By sunset, gangs of mobsters plan digital hits and groups of facebook poker players shuffle up and deal in the hopes of winning virtual facebook poker chips.
Of course, none of it is real, however the mind-boggling global recognition of social gaming — basic online applications which allow individuals to interact with their friends on social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, Bebo or Tagged — is transforming the future of gaming, experts say.
As the creator of well-known game titles such as FarmVille and Zynga Texas Holdem Poker, San Francisco, California-based Zynga has taken full advantage of this trend in social gaming.
For Zynga president Mark Pincus, the system for online gaming success on Facebook, MySpace and various other websites has been as straightforward: develop simple applications which players love but could quickly step away from and come back later to continue playing.
“We built the games so they could be played in a tab on your browser while you’re on a conference call,” said Pincus, a veteran Web entrepreneur who created Zynga in 2007. Naturally, they have been aided by the enormous expansion of Facebook and Myspace, in which the applications have become so popular they have led to “fan” sites dedicated to whining about being forced to watch buddies participate in them.
Facebook has over 400 million users worldwide, and is where the great majority of individuals participate in FarmVille and Mafia Wars in addition to many other Zynga games like FishVille, Vampires, Café World, YoVille and Zynga Poker.
Overall, more than 65 million gamers participate in Zynga games on a daily basis, according to game tracking firm Developer Analytics. Zynga’s top title, FarmVille, is played by approximately 75 million gamers each month — almost equal to the amount who have played the classic game Tetris during it’s entire existence.
The enormous expansion was rewarding but not completely unexpected to Pincus, whose prior startups have included Freeloader, a Web-based information-gathering service; tech-support company SupportSoft; and Tribe.net, an early social networking site from 2003. His company’s creations in the social gaming field was an effort to fill what he considered an astonishing void in most people’s daily Internet use.
“I thought in 2007 that something had gone oddly wrong with the whole Internet experience,” Pincus said. “I would have thought games would have been one of the top two or three experiences people had on the Internet.”
What Pincus got right, according to gaming expert Scott Steinberg, was a sort of return to the “golden era” of games like Pac-man and Super Mario Bros.
“Video games actually appealed to a huge cross-section. They appealed to everybody,” said Steinberg, publisher of DigitalTrends.com. “What happened is, as we went through the mid-’80s to the mid-2000s, you started to see gaming become more incestuous in terms of 18- to 34-year-old males making games for people just like them.”
Zynga applications like Café World and Farmville draw significantly greater rates of female participants compared to the majority of video games.By comparison, 3 of Zynga’s top five applications — FarmVille, Café World and FishVille — have largely woman gamers, with many participants outside the conventional 18- to 34-year-old range associated with those who play online games..
These social applications all work on the very same fundamental premise. Beginning with a basic farm, fish tank or cafe, the individual works in order to help make it larger and fancier, sharing in game virtual items with buddies and assisting each other along the way.
Several of Zynga’s earlier game titles merely mirrored already existing board and card games. It was Mafia Wars, in which competitors group up in order to execute hits on rival gangs and engage in virtual crime sprees, that first emphasized the use of team interaction to enhance the single player experience in online games.
Farmville took that formula a step further, with players plantingt virtual crops that can be harvested hours, or days, later. To earn free gifts and points, they can invite online friends to become their farm neighbors and assist each other by giving gifts or assisting with the harvesting. There’s no way to “win,” but the draw is in the process of actually building up and showing off your virtual farmland.
“A farm is something that is internationally understood and known. It’s cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-age,” Pincus said. “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”
Not that Zynga’s success has come without criticism. Competitors have accused Zynga of throwing around it’s venture capital money to copy existing titles and muscle out smaller developers. Several of its most popular game titles, such as FarmVille, are very similar to pre-existing applications coming from smaller developers, a reality Pincus dismisses by noting that video games have always fallen into genres with companies releasing similar titles.
Psycho Monkey LLC, the makers of Mob Wars, sued Zynga over the popular game, claiming they stole their intellectual property. That suit was settled this past august according to spokespeople at the two companies. Zynga also was hit with issues and lawsuits over its business model, which allowed gamers to earn in-game rewards for signing up to affiliate offers and in some cases, handing over their credit card information. Many of these offers amounted to what some called “in game scams”, leading to player’s credit cards being charged or software being installed on their computers which they did not want or authorize, a reality Pincus has acknowledged in the press.
And what about the millions of Facebook and MySpace users who are fed up with seeing game related updates on their friend’s walls or tired of receiving dozens of invitations to sign up to applications every day.
On Facebook, a group called “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” had more than 5.2 million fans recently.”Please. No more of this stuff,” wrote one member. “I’ve had all I can take. About to hang up FACEBOOK. Just want a nice cozy place to talk with my friends!”
“We have to evolve,” Pincus said “I think it’s heading to a place that’s more narrow-casting. I think you’ll get to a place where Facebook will be better about showing feeds to people who have a registered interest in them.”
While heavyweights like Electronic Arts and the popular Civilization series are making inroads into social gaming, Steinberg said, the genre is also opening up opportunities for smaller developers.
“We’re seeing, in many ways, a second renaissance for games,” Steinberg said.
“There’s been an epiphany among the developer community saying, ‘Look at these millions of users that we’ve forgotten to speak to for years.’ This can only be a good thing for the gaming industry in the end.”
This article was origionally published on CNN.com and can be found here.
