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Friday, February 01, 2008

Some Notes On Facebook Gaming

Just some personal thought:

1) If my ability to play the game is based largely on the number of people I can convince to install it, I'm from here on it just uninstalling it right away. It's a stupid design. Designers should be thankfully enough that I'm giving it whirl, by forcing me to essentially play a game of chain letter before I can even see what the gameplay might be like ... you're chopping yourself off at the knees.

2) Why the heck doesn't Scrabulous offer to send a notification whenever someone's turn is up?

3) BBS door games were once the total bomb. I still think there are some lost lessons there, but I think the fact that a portion of the people reading this have no clue as to what I'm referring to is evidence that they need to be evolved considerably before being compelling in a modern age.

5 comments:

Thomas said...

And where's my play-by-mail Advance Wars, Internet? Why are all of the Facebook strategy games basically skinned versions of Dope Wars?

This has been your daily complaint from The Guy Who Doesn't Care Enough To Fix It Himself.

sterno said...

Doors games for teh win! :)

Oh and did anybody here play VGA Planets?

Josh said...

I'd like to say I'm working on a Flex based, turn based, boardgame based RPG which should able to work in Facebook, but I can't say that working is how I'd describe my progress thus far.

And yeah - PBM strat games offer a better concept than Dope Wars, imo.

I think I played VGA Planets. Something something of a Solar Empire was my big vice.

Anonymous said...

1) Yeah, it's my pet peeve about Knighthood, which otherwise is mildly interesting enough to have me poke it once a day.

2) They used to, but I think it was bogging down their servers and they turned it off.

Unknown said...

Yeah I agree. When a game is based on two premises to win (ie popularity of the player in real life and game strategy)it can lead to a game that seems fun when you start but just depresses the player when they reach their limitations.

I agree with the door games comment too. I used to run a BBS and my faves were Falcon's Eye and Legend of the Red Dragon(L.O.R.D.)... I may have to resurrect some of these for facebook.