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 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?