Tell Us Your Opinion On Social Games Designs
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Social Games Design Tips & Opinions
Creating a social games design into your online web marketing will take time, ingenuity, creativity and ultimately a programmer designer or if you have a super creative idea, you will need an outsource or a dedicated staff of programmers, artists, and graphic designers able to create your social games design and of course a mint of money. All this, assuming your goal is to attract people to your game with the intent of getting them to ultimately spend money because they love it and want to do more! This goes way beyond getting people to register for your RSS feed. No. This is about turning your site into a game that people come, enjoy and stay for hours playing…buying stuff to stay longer.
Now, if you want to establish a “social games design” on your site that does not require a lot of programming then, frankly….I can’t help you!
The following tips are what I have learned to be the best social games design on the internet!
Make It Free To Play
Especially if a lot of detail has been put into the making of it. It should be easy to play and fit around a theme within your niche. So, if your business is about agriculture, make the game about farming.
Information Migration
Inside the game, you are teaching the player about the subject matter without actually teaching. This could be obvious or obscure. The player forms habits around the process of mastering a skill and in so doing you have taught that person a skill that can be applied elsewhere in a more real life situation. ie: The dynamics of working with other people under pressure in a team environment or Increased hand-eye coordination, or faster typing speed efficiency to name only a few of many examples that can be found from playing a game. One last one is my favorite: Learning to be creative.
Create Competency
Create a series of increasingly difficult challenges to complete in succession over time that rewards a player towards the development of mastery of that system. This keeps it fun while teaching a skill. It also keeps them coming back.
Relationship Dependency
Social media is about people actively interacting together to form a relationship. In any social games design it is imperative to encourage that interaction in the mechanics of the design. In some cases, players are forced to come together and work as a team to complete a challenge. In some games, players must “ask” other players for something they need. While in other games, like Empire Avenue, players are required to buy stock in each other and create missions, and be socially accountable to their activities on the web. The game design encourages others through a series of rules and principles to win the game but in the end they are socially richer with new friends, contacts and joint ventures.
Support & Service
If you are going to design a game, the best way to keep players coming back is know that the game is cared for by a professional company that takes care of fixing problems that arise and helping the players with problems.
Player Forum
Establish a player based forum. This is one of the most valuable resources available and its all free. Players interested in you game will assist other players, form guides and teach those new to the game….almost to the point that your service Tickets rarely get used.
Company Store
The way to make money with social games design is done on the back end. Creating upgrades to enhance the players skills or a tool to make challenges easier to complete. Appeal to the vanity of humans by providing a way to have stuff be shiny, or beautiful, or a weapon super deadly. The whole thing about monetizing the back end is that those players who wish to avoid paying will be jealous of others and buy that snazzy new thingie that his buddy bought from the store.
Add Your Opinion To Social Games Design Tips
Success is Yours – Take It!
Johnmark Cooper
P.S. This is a great opportunity for you to tell the game designers what you want to see in future social games designs. Be Heard!!