Facebook Indie Games

All you tweeters and bloggers looking down your noses on social gamers need to get this. You are already playing the biggest social game of all. Suckers!

• Reads, retweets, subscribers, and followers are your score. You try to maximize these. Bloggers will carefully study what kind of writing, headline, or content will score best in all these metrics.
• Getting comments or favorited is an achievement. "I got a comment" always gives you a little buzz. Until you start getting loads, when it becomes a score again.
• It's addictive. You can't stop yourself checking your analytics every time you go online, to see how you're doing, and whether there's anything you can do to improve your score.

A by-product of this game is that some useful, interesting content comes out every so often. That's nice, and makes me think blogging is basically benign. But for the blogger, that's irrelevant. It's all about the numbers.

Be honest because you know it's true. You might write something you thought was really good and interesting. But if you don't get the numbers, doesn't it feel like a waste of time?

A social game is just blogging with the useful content left out

In a game like Farmville or Mafia Wars, you work to create something that is even less useful than a blog. It's more pointless, but the motivations are the same. Zynga has figured out what makes blogging for free addictive, taken out what makes it hard, and then packaged it in a way that gets 30,000,000 people per day on board.

Free blogging platforms need to think like Zynga if they want to make money

Companies like Blogger, Posterous, or WordPress.com should distill all the metrics for your blog into a single score. They should have a leader board that every blogger on the platform can see. And you should be able to see where you rank against other blogs on related topics or in your online social circle. I want to compete with the other niche game development blogs -- I want a motivation to overtake them. I want to know where I stand.

The companies should charge real money for "unlockables" that will lead to you getting a higher score -- improving your posts' SEO, putting your post in a high traffic location where it's likely to receive comments, making it easier for visitors to retweet or otherwise share your posts.

But they should also let you earn these unlockables by playing the game well -- they should reward people who build popular blogs, because popular blogs are what markets the platform -- and because people who climb the leader board will force other people to act more competitively, and some of them will pay.

Social game designers need to look at what makes blogging addictive

Blogging is addictive because:

1. You can start small. Even if you are really bad at it, you will get some readers.
2. You get real time feedback on your score, but...
3. Your score can change at any time, so you'll keep coming back to check
4. It has an expressive element -- you choose what to write, you choose your theme. How long did you spend fiddling with the theme for your blog or Twitter account? You're no better than people who worry about the color of their farmhouse in Farmville.
5. The more you do it, the more important it seems. Once you have a few readers or subscribers, you start to feel obliged to keep it going. It's hard to walk away from a blog once you have readers... just like it's hard to walk away from a farm once you have crops growing.

People talk about a game being too addictive if you'd rather check in on it than play with your kids. Well I'm ashamed to say that it's not that rare I'll walk away from playing with my boy because I want to check Twitter.

Do you see the connection?

(My own blog is, of course, the exception to the rule.)