- Kristian Segerstrale of Playfish, quoted by John Willshere on Twitter.
I’ve seen variants on this sentiment quite a lot, more often about “social media” than “social games” (in fact someone replied to @willsh saying this soon after). There are two basic ideas behind it I think.
The first idea is that all games, or all media will be ‘social’ or have a social component. And that implies the second, which is that this social element will be so normalised that remarking on it will seem odd and silly.
I can get behind these ideas to an extent, definitely. I don’t know enough about gaming to really comment, but I doubt the standalone media experience will die off. But reading or watching without the whole sharing/commenting/remixing social element will be the basic option: something more like lurking is on a community. Now 90% of people lurk so it’s not exactly a minority activity! But nor is it what you’re thinking about when designing your community.
I think the interesting question is what we’ll talk about and get excited by when the social is assumed, when the fact of sociality itself isn’t interesting. I’m hoping there will be more excitement and interest around the different types of experiences ‘social media’ and ‘social gaming’ offer, less of the implied separation between the “content” and the experience of it.
At the moment we focus a lot on the content and a lot on the aggregate of the social interaction around it but not quite so much on what an individual’s experience of taking part in social media is like. We haven’t really got a handle on the different types of social media experience - the genres of social if you like: small group vs large-scale, open-ended vs a closed project, top-down v bottom-up, hierarchy v open participation, goals v sandbox, anonymous v identified.
All of these variables FEEL very different for a participant and we’re bunching them together as “social media” - where we do acknowledge differences it’s to focus on the tools - Facebook, Twitter - like everyone’s experience of THEM is the same! This is foolish and I think it’ll change quite quickly.
