With Friends Like These:
Participation and Protest
in Seven Facebook Games
Elizabeth Losh
University of California, Irvine
Dictator Wars
Patient Zero
Why was the game rejected?
A failure with only at most 120 active users
willing to devote time to multiple-choice tests.
Yet multiple-choice tests sometimes appeal to
large numbers of Facebook game players.
And there were already a number of viral games
about Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves that
thematized infecting, attacking, and transmitting.
But these movie monster games were perceived
as more fun.
Why did the Patient Zero game fail?
Thinking about design in Facebook games
1) Representation of the social field
(Dual player? Multi-player? Non-friends?
NPCs?)
2) Kinds of game interaction to accrue points
(Attacking? Gifting? Stealing? Swapping?)
3) Nature of the communication channel
(Automatic messages? Personalized notes?)
4) Role of surrounding discourses on Facebook
(Publicizing bugs? Resisting changes in
the status quo?)
Play With Less Identity Play
The Example of Alternate Reality Games
Your character looks exactly the
same as you. Your character will
have all the same skills and attributes
as you, and even the same memories
and feelings
Play as yourself. Your character in this game is
“2019 You.” You don't have to use your real
name, but please don't invent an entirely
fictional persona for the game. After all, in the
future, we'll all be some version of our real
selves. So try to imagine your real self in the
year 2019. And whenever possible, use your
real life knowledge and real life strengths to
help you contribute to Superstruct!
The Face of Facebook:
Rules for One-to-Many Print Ephemera
Private annotations and
board game or playing card conversions
“On Face Work” by Erving Goffman
“Face is a mask that changes
depending on the audience and
the social interaction.”
“an image of self delineated
in terms of approved social
attributes ”
“Face Threatening Acts” in Brown and
Levinson
“Face” vs. “Trust” in Tactical Iraqi
Winning and Losing
Reciprocity and Obligation
Privacy and Security
Sociality as a Design Element
Pork Invaders
Scrabulous and Scrabble
Debates about etiquette
How (and why) did fans revolt?
Albert-László Barabási on large hubs
Zombies
Other Blake Commagere Facebook
Applications
Parking Wars
Brenda Brathwaite
on the virtues of temporality and
networked thinking
“Turn-based gameplay,” “Repeat Visits,” “Encouraging
Competition,” and “Encouraging Network Proliferation”
(Lil) Green Patch
PackRat
How (and why) did fans revolt?
What do you hate
most?
I hate it all … Every ounce/
gram/chosen system of
measure. The rats are truly
useless! You can't trade
between sets or raise the
value of the cards you
have. They're only purpose
in this change was to make
money! Greed is the root
of all evil!! And the
*disturbingly new* Packrat
is evil. I’m done, that’s for
sure!!
Debates about etiquette
It’s not a gift if you ask for it
What the heck is up with people asking for tickets to be gifted
to them for 25 tx items ?? Ever since this gifting of tickets
came out people have just been plain greedy. If you don't like
that word too bad because that's what it is. Taking 200 tx for a
card that is less than that is greedy. I have seen some
horrendous trades lately and frankly I’m appalled.
I'm with you Michael. For me, the joy of gifting tickets has
been in surprising my good friends who would never ask for a
thing and are not expecting it in the slightest!
I can't believe the people posting threads asking for tickets most of them don't even do it in a nice way :0\
(Lil) Green Patch
Resistance to cause marketing
Resistance to anti-spam regulation
Resistance to the politics of representation
Lessons for Developers
Politeness matters
But so does the possibility that users will assert
membership rights from the standpoint of an
ideology of participatory culture
Facebook games can reflect larger conflicts in digital
culture such as intellectual property disputes or
attempts to monetize the free labor of others
So, rhetoric matters and so does civic action,
democratic expression, the defense of the social
contract, occasions for public speech, and
ceremonial observance of rules for deliberation.
Does ending matter, as Chris Holt claims in
Inside Social Games? Are these games
more like casual games or MMOs?
In a culture of remix, games may actually meld
multiple aspects of recognized affordances of
play. The Facebook game Mafia Wars, for
example, combines advancement oriented around
tasks and virtual currency (like Mob Wars),
fighting (like Zombies), gifting with the request
to gift back (like L’il Green Path), and collecting
sets of objects with an eye toward orderly
completion (like Pack Rat).
Mafia Wars
Spymaster
Questions? Comments?
lizlosh@uci.edu
http://www.virtualpolitik.org