FIFA 10 came out on Oct 20th and it has already stolen my heart. Not because of the game, I haven’t played, nor is it soccer (or football), which I do not follow in any capacity. The reason I’ve fallen for this game is because of this website: FIFA Earth.

In the growing world of social networks and system integration, game companies have been jumping on the band-wagon. Uncharted 2 has Twitter integration (though they seem to have problems with it), Xbox Live with have Facebook/Twitter capabilities, and Giant Bomb links player’s achievements together. Integrate and aggregation is the talk of the town.

Now what? What do we do now that we have achieved this integration. Well, visualization and analytics of course. Sure Uncharted 2 can tweet when you finish a game chapter but how many other players have completed that chapter too. When do those players play, did they finish the chapter in the same amount of time as you? While integrating achievement systems, Facebook and Twitter makes communication easier it does not make the information presented easier to understand. Now that we have these swiss-army knife systems let’s do something with them.

Enter FIFA Earth. There are other visualization/analytic game systems available; Valve shows Steam statistics on their website for example. However, it is rare to find one that is informative, interactive and aesthetically pleasing. FIFA Earth is just such a system. It does not have an extensive list of information to sift through but what it has is style.

FIFA Earth aggregates every match that is played in FIFA 10 from around the world, while any player is connected to the PlayStation Network. From what I have been told soccer is a very important sport worldwide so it only makes sense that a video game simulating real world soccer is just as popular; which means a lot of recorded games. 39 million to be exact. Each day’s total games played is available and is similar to other visualizations like Steam or Noby Noby Stats.

Each time a player completes a game in FIFA 10 it is uploaded online and goes into two different categories. One is for that player’s country and another is for the player’s chosen club. Categories based on country and club are ranked against each other by their ‘win percentage,’ which is calculated by their wins, losses, and draws from all the matches in that category (across all players). There is also an option to view their rank changes across time. I see that players from Ecuador have a winning percentage of 53 today and have been above 40% since October 7th.

All of this information is displayed using a three dimensional image of earth as viewed from space. Which makes sense given the data presented is all geo-located. This feature is also combined with FIFA Earth’s own Twitter feed, which displays tweets about FIFA 10. Each tweet is marked on the globe and they stretch across the screen in a list next to the Earth’s image, it’s quite elegant.

When it comes down to it FIFA Earth has three things: relevant Twitter feed, records the total games played and records the winning conditions of each game (separated by categories). Said like that it doesn’t seem like a lot of information but the presentation is excellent. I hope we will see more websites and game features like this in the future.

Like others, I have found the recent “social” game explosion to be rudimentary and lacking. When I log into Mafia Wars or 140Blood I do not see a game, I see a vending machine. Push a series of buttons and a tasty treat comes out. You are hanging out with your friends so why not have something sweet on the side, maybe you can coax a friend to have one too.

Don’t get me wrong, these type of social games are games (there are goals, actions, rules) and they can be seen as more of a critique on MMORPG gameplay as much as the Flash game “This is the Only Level” is for redundant level design.

However, I don’t see what is so social about Mafia Wars. I see my friends, I can place them in my mafia family and the game says they “help” me complete jobs, but this is all asynchronous gameplay; I am never actually helping my friends or playing with them. There’s a big difference here compared to other “social” games like Scrabble online which allow players to play each other right then and there.

The difference between these two types of social games is actually the age old division between communities and society (nature vs. modernity or tribal vs. systematic). This fight weighs the benefits/drawbacks of a small, local, egalitarian community verses the large, systematic, democratic society.

Many writers and theorists have written on the subject: which organizational structure is the natural human state, what properties of each should be cultivated, which is considered good or bad, etc.

Ferdinand Toennies is one sociologist that I believe does a wonderful job of separating the two distinctions in his published work “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft” (meaning “community and society”) back in 1887.

Community

Toennies emphasizes the fact that humans in a community relate to one another based on their blood, neighborhood or common habits. Communities are often family oriented, in the same general location and everyone is friendly with each other, participating in common rituals and have similar likes/dislikes. In a community, members adjust to each other, understand and organize together, provide common support and promote ownership amongst all.

Society

A society is the artificial construction of community, according to Toennies, where individuality takes over and “everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others.” Everyone must rely on artificial means of currency and exchange in a society because there is no sense of shared worth, like in a community. Individuals are separated from the process of exchange and force (legal and governmental bodies) must be created in order to manage human interactions.

Not Social, Community and Society

There is a striking resemblance between the two types of social games I mentioned and Toennies’ distinction between communities and societies. Mafia Wars is defiantly an example of a “society game,” as players are isolated from one another and are always at ends with other players, trying to get more power or money. Scrabble online, on the other hand, is a “community game” where players have a chance to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.

I think this distinction is key in understanding where social gaming is going. It seems like the only community games that exist are re-hashed old boardgames that are digitally transformed. While the society games look more like the vending machine games, trying to get into everyone’s pocket book while appearing to connect the player to all their friends.

My worry is that these trends will continue unperturbed. We will not progress past the boardgame motif for community games and micro-transaction gameplay will plague the society games for years to come.

Perhaps some combination of the two may be reached and these two types of games do not need to stay separated. It is essentialist to think that only the properties of either communities or societies show up in a specific human organization, while in almost all cases a mixture of properties appear. The problem is that games are abstractions and have the ability to be essentialist, casting out the properties of one organizational structure or the other, and focusing on only a subset of properties.

My plea is thus not for Mafia War or 140Blood to disappear but for game developers to continue to push for community games too, besides the typical boardgames, and attempt to mix the two game styles together. There is a lot that can be done with Mafia Wars such as offering more real-time gameplay when friends are online, richer strategy/skill-based elements in the game, and communication between rival players other than just “attack me.”

We must foster what it means to actually be a part of a community online because we often get lost in the properties that make it more like a society.

Maxis pushes the social gaming boundary again come June.

The Sims 3, which drops on June 2nd, will have greater social connection features for players and an in-game town to buy/sell items. This means players can not only share their creations, as they have been doing in Sims 2, but they will have an easier time sharing their personal stories from their game. Maxis will provide players with a Movie Mash up tool for players to create their own videos in the game (which I assume will be more robust then the video capture capabilities in The Sims 2); another machinima friendly tool I hope. Players can embed those videos on social network sites or blogs and it looks like other content will be available to share too.

The in-game town for buying and selling items will be a place for players to show off their creations. A Gamer Daily article says the “downloadables, including updates, patches, community content, exchange content and other media will be accessible via the easy to cruise Game Launcher.” Maxis is also building some search and filter features into the game, with some recommendations features to top it all off (W00T).

The Sims is the biggest selling series of all time so having these social features is to their benefit. Though, I’m wondering if the reason that The Sims series is so popular is due to their social features. It is not even an MMO (well not anymore), these are players who are playing a single player game. Maybe some other game developers should start looking into building integrated social features into their next game … just a suggestion.

I saw the Shattered Reality Interactive video from the Techcrunch 50 conference today. That was brutal. I thought the speaker did a horrible job. The entire talk was full of assumptions, like WoW is great and games need to follow their model.

Some other great gems from the talk. The speaker said he has been playing MMOs for a decade. And apparently 10 years is as far back as MMOs go because UO was the first one. ….. Uh what? How about Meridian 59 or Habitat or even MUDs. The fact that this guy can give proper “Props” to the history of MMOs and instead relies only on his experience makes me feel uneasy about this company.

Another gem was when the presenter showed a graphic stating that the standard MMO model is PVP, Arenas, Battle grounds, Quests (from least to most content developed for those areas). Yeah, that is standard, if you want to make WoW. What about other MMOs that do not focus on those aspects? What else can we do except copy WoW?

Another quote was “most of the games out there today, 95% are all fantasy games.” (Umm maybe the ones you have played.) And so these guys wanted to try something new, something called a Sci-Fi game. They call it an ancient future game (which I took as being fantasy with Hi-Tech items). Considering I can think of a number of Sci-Fi MMOs; Planet-side, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa, this idea is not new.

Finally, a very smart guy named Sean Parker seemed to be the only panelist that wanted to actually question the competency of this company. He talked about the problems with gamers create their own world and how controlling the story will be a major problem. To which the presenter stated that, yes the company itself will control a lot about the game but just that they will be listening to their players throughout the rest of the game’s development. HOW IS THIS ANY DIFFERENT FROM AN ALPHA OR BETA TEST. Besides the fact that you are only beta testing 30% of the world at once instead of 80%.

This talk pissed me off, another WoW clone just trying to find a hook.

From Gamasutra, and MTV Multiplayer.

Blizzard is working on an achievement system that will track players throughout multiple blizzard games. Basically you get a gamerscore based on your achievements in each game. The best thing about the article is this quote:

“You’ll have this Blizzard identity, and you’ll be able to see things like “Oh, this guy was great at Diablo III, but he never played Starcraft and he was mediocre in WoW.”

Yes because I want people to know that I’m great at Diablo 3 but suck at WoW.

Now given that I, personally, do not care if I receive trophies or achievements in games there are bound to be other players who feel the same way. And while I usually let bygones be bygones (I believe in player types and gamerscores/achievements cater to the achiever player type) it sometimes seems that games just look for the easiest way to keep players coming back to their games. They always hold that Twinkie out in front of you just enough where you want to get to that next level, get at one special item or get every fraking pinata in your garden (damn you Viva Pinata). But when you reach those goals you notice you just did the same repetitive tasks over and over to reach a goal, which now they seem meaningless that you achieved them, and you want your time back. (getting there maybe a little more rewarding then the goal, such as playing with friends, but that depends on the players)

One achievement that was spoken of would be given to a player that has both a level 70 horde and alliance character. Will that achievement really make people want to level up both a horde and alliance character? I don’t think it will, except for the players that would have done it anyways. Personally, from my time in WoW, I’m disgusted with everything alliance, I would never play an alliance character. I think that was one thing that the game did well, it made the factions hate each other, which made for an exciting game.

But I digress, linking player data together is the step in the right direction for this new age of social networks and you have to start somewhere. Blizzard’s The Armory website is pretty cool, it gives information about WoW competitions and character stats. I think ladder information for competitions are a little different compared to looking at player John Doe’s character stats since in competitions players are there to compete against one another for dominance and notoriety. Comparing Player A to B at random just doesn’t seem as relevant but what if we could do more with this data?

My future thesis is going to be covering topics like this and explore how we can build multiplayer games that go beyond announcing that Player A has a lot more time to play than Player B and how players can get more out of games through using shared data.