Game Café - Games and Social media

by Max Nichols

For our October meeting, IGDA members met for a Gamecafé night at Hurley’s Irish Pub, to discuss the intersection of games and social media. The Gamecafé meeting format involves intimate discussions about a topic in a casual setting – dinner, in this case. Many of us arrived an hour before the discussions officially began to grab some food, catch up with friends and meet new people.

Once everyone was ready we launched into the discussion which was split up groups for each of the three topics. Each group discussed any given topic for a short length of time, and then everyone jumped up and rotated to a new table.

Chris Crowell, Creative Director at Tribal Nova, led the discussion on designing games for social media platforms, which was loosely defined as Facebook, iPhone, Twitter, Playstation home and anything along those lines. We covered a wide variety of topics, starting with accessibility since it is a huge issue and one that separates a casual design from more traditional games. There was an interesting discussion on griefing, where people gave their opinions on when and where it was healthy and whether a design should ever encourage it. We also discussed monetization and micro-transactions as well as how they affect a game from a design standpoint.

Chris Crowell (Tribal Nova) takes furious notes as he leads the
"designing social games" discussion.

The second topic, led by Eric Chartrand, a game designer at EA Montreal, was about using social media and social tools in traditional games. This group focused on how to harness social tools or media to improve more traditional games, via leadership boards, friend lists, guilds, etc. We discussed how glory, as perceived by other players, is very important. We also discussed the differences between a global high score list and more segmented methods, such as just trying to beat your own score. iPhone apps that tie into broader games, such as the ability to access World of Warcraft’s auction house via an app, came up briefly. We also had a very interesting moment while we talked about Demon Souls and some of the interesting new ideas in that game. That brought us to the conclusion that players enjoy knowing that their actions will have an effect on other players and that that is a way to create a powerful sense of meaningful play.

Eric Chartrand (EA) leads the "leveraging social media in
traditonal games" topic.

The final table was hosted by Ken Schachter, the founder and president of Trapdoor, where we explored a large variety of topics. In fact, we joked throughout the evening about this group being the “everything else” catch-all table. We explored three major topics: marketing, recruitment and development, all via social media. Marketing touched on the fairly obvious, such as word of mouth, but we also talked about mass review systems like that of the iPhone. We also talked about the role of official communities like Bioware’s new community site. The recruitment discussion centered around contests, for the most part, and the way skilled people can be found at events like Dominance War and Gamestop’s Indie Game Challenge. For development we talked about tools like Twitter, Wikis and feeds to help keep development teams informed and enthusiastic. We also touched on “crowd-sourcing” – tapping into large numbers of people for content and creation. Spore is a good example of this.

Every other use of social media (eg, recruiting, marketing,
training, etc) fell onto Ken Schachter's (trapdoor) shoulders to
moderate.

Ultimately, it was a fantastic night – great food, great company and great discussions. I left feeling like an accepted part of a greater community of game developers, a community that is always striving to better itself. Which is ultimately what the IGDA is all about and I was glad to be a part of it.