Shared worlds and social games
“Social games” seems to be the new black these days. And, yet, the social mechanics seem to boil down to nothing more than “collecting” as many “friends” as you can in order to unlock content. (Please imagine me using quote fingers dramatically when you see those quotes.) 
For instance, some games have “quests” (in most games, that means one click).
These jobs sometimes require you to have a certain amount of friends in your “crew” or group or neighbors before you can access it. That really just means inviting players into the game and forgetting about them since they become a number.
Interestingly, this gives rise to “add me trains,” where a huge comment thread consists of players asking other players to add them as friends to increase their in-game friend count.
Or, you give a friend a gift to entice him or her to play the game. Gifting can be very fulfilling, but in this case it’s entirely in the service of marketing the game with sleight of hand. It’s not actually “social” in the way you expect when you say the word.
But…
…is this fun?! The answer depends on who you ask, but it’s not much fun to me. These games are certainly engaging because of the behavioral psychology behind their design, but I’m not sure that is the same as being fun.
There’s no meaningful interaction in most current “social” games. Your social graph is nothing but a marketing data mine for the developers. I don’t have a big problem with that on its own, because you do opt in. You don’t have to invite your friends. But the motivating factor is not the quality of the game, and I would wager that you won’t need to force your players to tell friends if the game is good enough.
I love the idea of shared worlds.
As I define it, a shared world game is where the gameplay alters the world state, and the world state alters the gameplay in a fun feedback loop. It’s really fascinating to think about the potential when players’ actions can change the world in which they play, and then that, in turn, can affect what players do next. It sounds like a blast to me.
It also happens to dovetail nicely with social games. I mean, here’s a chance to make them actually social! I don’t mean like “talky ha-ha” social. I mean like “negotiating with each other” or “participating in simple forms of governance within a game world” social. You know, the kind of social where you interact with other people and fun things happen as a result.
To be clear, these things don’t have to happen in synchronous, full-on MMO style. But it also doesn’t have to be a game as vacuous as most of what we see on Facebook today.
The time is ripe for a new kind of social game that is more than hollow mouse clicks on a plastic harvest. And I hope to make one soon.