Boss: …and then in December you’re going to go to Los Angeles for the launch event…
Meg: Does this launch involve talking to strangers? Because I distinctly remember asking to not have to do that.
<Ten minutes later>
Meg: Wait! I’m going fly from New York to LA like a high-powered jetsetter! I’m going to talk about how much work I get done on the plane! I’m going to have a drink in the airport bar with my smartphone out! YEAH! I’m awesome!
Boss: I knew you’d come around.
So I’ve been struggling with my love for MyTribe and the way it’s been spamming up recently. I logged on the other day, and was immediately harassed for not playing.
I dislike this on a couple of levels. First, if the game’s any good, I’ll make time to play it. Trust me, I can find the time to play games I like, I don’t need to be punished or bribed into playing. Penalties like this turn gameplay into an obligation for me.
Second, I dislike the whole daily Tribal Bonus as a game mechanic. Adding the daily reward seems makes a casual Facebook game seem less skill-based and more luck-based. Admittedly there’s not a whole lot of skill in keeping your MyTribe people alive and well, but there are lots of individual choices. Adding a daily checkin creates a click-reward sequence that’s less like solving a puzzle or playing pretend, and more like a rat in an experiment.
I see so much potential in social Facebook games, that I’m frustrated when actual gameplay falls short. (Translation: Why isn’t the real world as awesome as my imagination?)
I’ve written before about the anonymous, automatic nature of virtual free gifting, but virtual trading doesn’t have to be so thoughtlessly spammish. What if we traded finite resources instead of blasting our social networks with free virtual goods? In MyTribe, that would be seeds, recipes and crafted items, as well as swapping salvage with friends to complete collections.
To see the appeal of trading for virtual items, just look at any MMO’s auction house, shopping in Big Fish-style casual games, and I even remember trading with NPCs at certain stops on the green-and-black Oregon Trail. Instead of offering open borders (Don’t do it. Montezuma’s a jerk.) or weapon enchantment, a casual game tradescreen would offer players the chance to trade for new seeds or give surplus stock to new players. With so many possibilities for trading in Facebook games, it seems like a waste to be stuck on socially spamming free gifts.
Virtually trading an item from your own inventory has inherently more weight than giving twenty friends a free gift. You don’t have that cow or stork feather when you click on friends to receive your gift, so you’re not invested in the exchange. Collectibles, which I’ve recently learned are the lifeblood of social games, could still exist with finite resources. An example for MyTribe might be rare plants that require maintanence to grow and only produce a limited number of sharable seedlings. Or tiered items, crops that are required to unlock other, cooler recipes.
There would still be the option to brag about your resources on your wall, and since acquisition would be skill-based (based on a combination of trading, high agriculture stats and crop-tending), I’d probably be more inclined to do that than to let everyone know I’d received a random drop in a salvage crate.
Since the goal of many social games is to produce increasing numbers of clicks, a virtual auctionhouse would be successful there. Many WoW players have auctionhouse alts or check back at specific times to see how their sales are going. Not that I ever play Facebook games when I should be working, but if I did, I might check in now and then to see what was new on the AH. And an automated alert that my chuckberries had sold or that the recipe for cadmium blue dye was available might pull me back into a game.
Monetization would be easier, too, since a gooseberry seed with a high auction house price has more inherent value. A player’s choice would now be between trading a virtually valuable item or paying a real dime to get the item they want. And a real-money price, even for players who haven’t invested Facebook credits or MyTribe pearls, could also add to the perceived value of items when players trade that item or seedlings produced from that item. I’ve also been in a lot of conversation at work about virtual currencies and the possibility of cashing out one’s virtual goods and services for real cash.
The social aspects to Facebook trading are even more interesting. What if you need that chuckberry or gooseberry for a dye recipe, but the only way to get it is by trading for it? Would we be helpful neighbors, offering our seedlings and salvage to our friends, or hoarders, making sure we were the only island with purple dye? And what would that do to our Facebook priorities? “Yeah, I know Sarah posts a lot of pictures of her cats, but she is my only source for cadmium yellow dye…”
(Large portions of these were directly inspired by Darius’ awesome post over on Tiny Subversions about Spelunky as a Facebook game. Read it for an awesome blend of hilarious and thought-provoking.)
Auto-Cool Twitter Locations This app would automatically add my location in great detail when I tweet from someplace cool, like when I’m sitting on modern white furniture in a Madison Ave ad office, or having a meeting in a restaurant with an indoor waterfall, or commuting through Central Park, or working from a coffeeshop where the baristas are all way too fashionable to be pouring coffee.
But this app would also check my location, and automatically stop including any geographical location in my tweets when I’m in New Jersey, or waiting in the Port Authority to go back to New Jersey.
Tweets from work (Oh, hi, Boss. Um. I never tweet from work.) would go out as Cutting Edge Virtual World Developer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and not This Desk In The Server Room Is So My Office.
A few years ago, my friend Allison got married. Her wedding is famous for two things. The first is a bridesmaid-dress hemming party on the night before the wedding.
The other us that although it was the King-Leary wedding, Allison and her husband did not take my suggestions to hyphenate their name. I don’t know why not.
Time marches on, and now Allison and her husband are expecting a baby! I was pretty excited about it (stuffing my fingers in my ears and singing loudly when she attempted to tell me any pregnancy details, but excited nonetheless). I asked her if she’d name her future baby Goneril or Regan or Cordelia. She said no. Actually, I think she said something about not subjecting her child to years of torment just to amuse me. Whatever.
Then she said that Joseph was a good family name on both sides, but she won’t be naming the baby Joe King either.
Shuffleupagus (n) A person who shuffles around papers and office supplies in an attempt to look busy, expending more energy on the shuffling than he would doing actual work.
This comes from Michelle, formerly of Faster Than The World, but I don’t think the Shuffleupagus is an endangered species. You may have encountered one yourself!
Stick called today, partly to catch up and partly as just another step in the hellish process of separating ours into his and mine. I haven’t really known what to say about him here, because I still have a lot of respect and affection for him. First I was all “We’re going to work things out!” and then I was all “Still over. Still sad about it.” and neither one of those was a really happy thing I wanted to record for posterity (and the internet).
“I think I’ll spend Thanksgiving with my parents and then head to Denver,” Stick said. “I don’t want to wait too much longer to leave, or I’ll run into weather troubles on my drive west.”
There was silence for a moment, and then I said what had to be said.
“Do you have an extra axle?”
“Of course. And I’ll try not to get cholera,”
“Be careful fording rivers.”
Sure, the end of our relationship is like a giant gaping wound, but there’s no wrong time for an Oregon Trail reference.
Uptown, downtown. Local, express. Connections are available to the 1, 2, 3, and 9. I love the subway. It feels so cyberpunk to watch clips, play games (Alchemy!) or listen to podcasts on my phone on the subway car. And I’m embarrassingly proud of myself for finding my way around.
It’s not just the subway, actually, I love my whole trip to and from work. I like that I don’t have to think about traffic or parking, and that instead of other drivers on the beltway TRYING TO CRASH INTO ME AND KILL ME, I can sit and read my book, or listen to my headphones, or just look out the window at the New York City icons.
(Sure, it’s probably only a matter of time before I start grumbling about waiting for the bus or about how the PATH train stations seem permanently under construction. Let me enjoy it while it lasts.)
I was on the subway the other day when my stunning lack of direction struck again, so I stopped a random guy and asked for directions. He paused to think about it, and then burst into song:
“Yo-ou must take the A-train….”
Manhattan is awesome.
What with a very full first day and then all that dancing down the street singing about how I’ve gotten a new job, by the time I got to the train station, I’d completely missed rush hour. That means forty minutes between trains to Jersey and a transfer in Newark and other signs of commuter hell. Scep and Katie’s condo is awesome, but it’s at the edge of civilization. (Don’t even try to defend it, Scep, how long is your drive to work?!?) (And Andrea, your house is marked by Here be dragons on my map.)
I finally got back to Scep’s place and chatted with Scep and Katie for a bit before I picked up some clothes and left again to spend the night at my mom’s so I wouldn’t have to do that again tomorrow morning. My folks’ house is much closer to Manhattan-bound commuter rail, and therefore my awesome new job.
I took the Clove Road shortcut by Montclair State, thinking about how I’d spent quite a lot of high school weekends here at Six Brothers diner (Ooh, arcade Puzzle Bobble! That should definitely go on my 15 games list!), and not about the complete stupidity of driving a fifteen-year-old car through a college late at night. I’ve been pulled over probably six or seven times since I got my license, and five or six of those were for driving a battered old car on campus at night. It was worse when I was a new driver, going exactly the speed limit with an expression of mortal terror, but you’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now.
By the way, when the cop pulls you over in the middle of the night and asks where you’re coming from and where you’re headed, he doesn’t actually need to know about your new job, your move from North Carolina, and your old boyfriend.
I’m just saying.
It seems to me like two people who are both playing just one more turn, finishing this raid, or getting to a good savepoint would be less likely to make it to bed. But who am I to contradict Cosmo?
