I think it’s that the “game” responds to your choices in a way that is both unpredictable and (usually) logical. When you play a move in chess, you don’t know exactly what will happen next. But you try to guess — and guess ahead quite a long way. And that the small action you take with one piece can affect the whole board.

Playing against an intelligent opponent is only one way of having a player’s actions have unpredictable and far reaching, but logical, consequences. It can be built into the logic of a single player game too.

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And one more thing — game space in Farmville is important as a means of expression through the game. People design their farms, often quite carefully. The layout of a farm is ignored by the game mechanic, but not by players who look at each others farms for entertainment.

It might even be that good looking farms do better because they bring in more visitors, who can then “help”. I like the idea of social games where the players produce some kind of “expressive artifact” as a consequence of the game.

Well I totally agree. The visual representation of a space is what creates a large part of the attraction and some of it’s gameplay for the users. BUT I might have to elaborate what I mean when I say “game space”:

If you hadn’t noticed from the name of the blog, I come from an architecture background and wrote my diploma thesis on digital game spaces. My own definition of spaces is that you only experience space as something different from – say a photograph of a space – when you MOVE within it. When there’s interaction. That’s where the image of space becomes space. And Farmville does very very very little of that.

Also yeah: Players creatively generating stuff is awesome because A) It increases retention of these users B) it generates stories that players can talk about and C) produces marketing material.

1) Yeah. Simple rules, deep gameplay. That’s definitely a good way BUT if you look at games using that set of mechanics – let’s say go or chess as examples from the board game world – you’ll notice that they only create depth because you play against another person. Their act of playing is what makes these games so great, which kind of goes back to the point I made above.

2) Just what I was thinking. Coming from developing the Wii and DS Anno: Create a New World game, that’s just what we did there. It’s common for tutorials in retail games and will eventually find it’s way into social games, but I don’t know if we’re there yet.

It might even be that good looking farms do better because they bring in more visitors, who can then “help”. I like the idea of social games where the players produce some kind of “expressive artifact” as a consequence of the game.

“Play next to each other” is the killer point of social gaming. Any social game designer should have that etched on their foreheads.

Should social games become more complex? I have two thoughts on this:

(1) it is possible to give games “depth” while having extremely simple mechanics. You can explain every “feature” of drafts or dominoes in a few minutes, but these games have tremendous depth.

(2) I like the idea of experienced players unlocking new “mechanics” — not just new objects that have different “stats”, but that fundamentally change game behavior. Is anybody doing that yet?