Fixing social media integration in video games
By: Jeff Rivera
There have been many attempts by publishers and developers to integrate social media into video games. This integration has ranged from meaningful to throwaway, but it's rare that anybody has found good reason to be excited by Facebook and Twitter functionality.
One of the earlier games to offer direct integration into social media was Uncharted 2: Among Theives. At first it was a bit of a novelty, but the frequency at which it would update aggravated the Twitter followers of the people who were pushing out updates through the game. So much backlash came out that the Twitter integration was actually disabled and the game no longer supports that functionality.
More recently, Sword and Sworcery, our mobile game of the year for 2011, had an option that allowed users to tweet out lines of dialog from the game as they progressed. Twitter feeds were absolutely flooded for days, and while it was irritating for Twitter users, it was said that the constant updates actually helped to sell more copies of the game.
But not all Facebook and Twiter integration has been annoying or used solely to spam your followers as a way to sell more copies of the game. Often times the social integration is meant to be a convenient addition to the game. In the case of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the Facebook connection feature allows you to more easily find people that you know who have Battle.net accounts. I've personally re-connected with some old friends through StarCraft, and it's given me a couple of people to play with when I don't feel like playing random opponents online.
Microsoft has taken this concept and pushed it one step farther with the Beacon functionality. You can post to Facebook any game that you're playing and mention that you're looking for people to come join you. It only hits your wall a single time, but it also will alert anybody via Xbox Live who beings to play that game that you're online and looking to play with others. It's pretty cool as an OS function, but I still feel we can do better on the individual game level.
Some of the things that I'd like to see games do a bit more often would include:
- Allow users to post screenshots of games into their social feeds
- Allow notification of passing up friends in high score orientated games (tweet directly at the user you just bested)
- Allow tournament tracking and results reporting for online gaming. This would be especially fun for fighting games.
- Share cool stats! Imagine something saying, "@jar155 has just killed his 1 millionth Zerg unit in StarCraft 2" or "@jar155 just fired his 10 millionth bullet in Battlefield 3"
- Allow the game to give the user the abillity to restrict frequency. Automatically shared content would get bypassed if it falls within the restricted frequency. Gamers could set it based on a game's internal clock or by using the system's clock.
- Never tie in-game bonuses to Facebook/Twitter usage. it's starting to happen now, and it needs to stop.
- Let you export your characters to images to be shared on social networks in games where you can either customize or create your characters.
There's plenty of more great uses for social media in gaming, but the real key is ensuring that the shared content is not spammy, promotional, or just simply worthless to the people who are going to have it presented to them in their feeds. Social media is an opt-in experience, so publishers need to be careful to respect that.
I use social networks quite a bit, and I use them to share video game related content just as much as I do for any other topic. If publishers could come up with a more viable way for me to push content onto my social networks directly from their products, I'd be happy to do so. As it stands now, most games are little better than a complete failure whe it comes to social network integration.
