Independent Game Thoughts

Bing Gordon has certainly earned the right to his opinion on the game industry's latest golden child genre, social games.  His successful career with Electronic Arts is evidence of that.  Unfortunately, I don't exactly buy his assertion that social games are the singular future of games.  His article wants the reader to believe that console games and PC gaming are a thing of the past now that we've discovered social gaming.  He supports that argument with the sheer number of people playing these games and their "Mother-in-law"-as-in-not-a-core-gamer demographic.  He's also a significant part of Zynga which immediately makes anything he says about social gaming suspect; at the very least biased.  While it is true that social games have taken off to unexpected heights and it is true that the analytic mindset of the web is coming to game development, it's folly to believe that social gaming will replace traditional gaming.  Instead, the face of gaming will change and evolve in ways we can't truly predict today.

1. The market is expanding.  Every new paradigm shift in the game industry is heralded as the previous shift's killer.  Consoles were going to kill the PC as a gaming platform.  Didn't happen.  Phones were going to obliterate the sales of dedicated hand helds.  The Nintendo DS/DSi sells quite well to this day.  Recently, cloud-based game delivery mechanisms have been slated to kill the social game and consoles.  When will we learn that none of this really happens and only makes for good blog posts?  Given that reasoning, you would have thought chess would have died years ago.  It's a board game; how quaint.  Given that reasoning, how is it that the Nintendo has sold the Wii to the degree of success that it has.  The Wii is the least social connected console of this generation.
2. His assertion that our ability to handle more than Dunbar's Number is unsupported except through the glasses of his company, Zynga.  Sure we can handle more information and we've grown adept at handling more contacts but Dunbar's Number centers on stable relationships.  The relationships created from casual social games are fleeting at best.  If they are stronger, they are that way because of some other factor and not because they sent you some sheep or a few chickens in a social game.  Dunbar talks about the strength of relationships and weak ties versus strong ties between individuals.  While there is much to be learned from harnessing weak ties to get things accomplished, calling this an increase in Dunbar's number is a mistake.  What is much more likely happening is that the not-quite-strong tied social relationships on our social graphs are switching places with weaker tied relationships on an as needed basis.  We're still handling the same number of strong tied relationships.  Something like this needs time for observation.  Dunbar, himself, is doing a Facebook study so it will be interesting to see what he finds.  Right now, Gordon goes out on a limb to claim that Dunbar's Number is changing.  I hesitate because many have claimed this to be the case, including myself, but in the end, the number has held steady, even in the face of more systemic studies, and weathered the test of new technologies.

Gordon certainly has reason to be excited about the prospects of Zynga.  Zynga has put social gaming on the map for all intents and purposes.  His enthusiasm for all the good that is social games comes out in his article.  Unfortunately, that same enthusiasm looks like it is coming from someone that has had one too many cups of the social gaming Koolaid.