Three lessons social games can learn from Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the mother of all go-anywhere, do-anything role-playing games, arrives on store shelves today, and you can bet there are a more than a few people ditching work due to a sudden bout of the Skyrim flu. With all of the buzz surrounding this new game (and the fact that not too many people seem willing to skip work to play a new Facebook game), here's a few lessons social game makers can adopt.

1. Let the players pick their own style

One of the things Skyrim does best is throw away boundaries found in most games and let the player dictate their own experience. That includes everything from your avatar's physical details (right down to nose length and chin width) to what type of player they want to be. Do you want to rush into battle wielding an axe? Shoot magic spells from your hands? Both? You can do it all. There's also the option to jump headfirst into the main action or dabble with alchemy, which involves collecting plants and other items, mixing them together and watch the results. It would be interesting to see more social games give players more freedom to craft the entire experience. Imagine being able to mix a purple cow with a certain type of tractor in FarmVille for some interesting results.

2. Make the game feel expansive

Skyrim offers players a big expansive world to play in, and that's one of the biggest selling points in the game. You can literally walk dozens of square miles in the game, while taking in the vast landscape around you. There's something about being given a wide-open playground that lends to the fun, as if anything can happen at any given moment. Games like FarmVille, CityVille and The Sims Social tend to take place in a small, confined area that the player can claim as his/her own. There's the option to visit your friends' homes/farms/cities, but that is also in the same confined area and there's nothing connecting the various locations, taking away from that go-anywhere, do-anything sense of adventure.

skyrim dragon

3. Don't ignore the story

Story is an essential element in Skyrim and helps you pull you into the game from the very beginning. And, as any good game storytelling should, it keeps you playing just to see what happens next. In social games, story is still mostly an afterthought. FrontierVille/Pioneer Trail was the first big social game to take a stab at having a central story to back up the action -- and other games, such as Playdom's Deep Realms, have followed suit -- but there is still plenty of room for social games that take storytelling seriously.

E3 2011: Shooters, not social, are still king

At the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, aka E3, thousands of journalists and industry insiders gather to see the latest and greatest in gaming.

Over the past few days, companies like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have been putting on big-budget events to show off shiny new gaming hardware such as the PlayStation Vita and Wii U consoles, along with a slew of new games with names like Gears of War 3, Halo IV, Call of Duty: modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. These games all have the budget of a Hollywood blockbuster films and promise to put hair on your chest as you take out enemies -- both human and alien -- using an arsenal that would rival that of a medium-size army.
Based on everything that's been pimped and promoted on six-story high screens in the Los Angeles Convention Center this week, it's clear that shooting -- not social -- is still number one when it comes to making video games. This, despite the fact that social games like CityVille and FarmVille have somehow managed to rake in millions of dollars and attract as many, if not more, 'non-gamers' than the Nintendo Wii has done over the past several years.

margaritaville onlineWalk the gigantic halls of the convention, and you see hoards of gawkers struggling to catch a glimpse of the new Batman game from WB Interactive, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any social games in the midst of all the hubbub. For instance, there's no giant Zynga booth with booth babes dressed as farmers or mobsters. After a quick tour of the floor, the only social game getting any major representation was Jimmy Buffet's MargaritaVille (which we covered several weeks ago) at the THQ booth, but not a single person was stopping to take a look at the game, even though it was sitting smack dab in the middle of a festive-looking straw hut. (Maybe they should serve free Margaritas to attract more attention.)

The only big social gaming announcement at the show came from Electronic Arts, which debuted The Sims Social at its big press conference with a slightly awkward video trailer. The other big social gaming announcement of the week -- Zynga's new iOS game Hanging with Friends -- didn't even happen in the hallowed halls of E3. Last year, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft all bandied about the term 'social' in their press conferences, which were mostly lip-service to one of the year's hottest buzzwords, but this year, that has been replaced with extensive chatter about 3D and catchphrases like, "You are the controller."

Does this bode well for the social gaming scene? It's clear the video game world is still not quite sure what to make of social games, and whether these so-called 'disruptors' will be able to hold on to their explosive popularity for the long term. Maybe social games will go the way of casual games like Bejeweled, which have an equally passionate fanbase as a Gears of War or Halo but have been shoved off into their own little gaming ghetto, labeled as something that your Mom likes to play, or maybe in future editions of E3, smart game companies chasing profits will find a little space for farmers and frontier pioneers along the marines and superheroes.

The Sims Social: Grab free fan gifts with our links roundup

Where else will the Angry Birds crash land into and dominate? Nintendo 3DS? Xbox 360? Your scientific calculator? Who knows, but according to All Things Digital, Rovio SVP of brand advertising and analytics Wibe Wagemans said yesterday at the Mobile Future Forward conference in Seattle, Wash. that Angry Birds is the number on game on Google+ Games.

Granted, that's out of all 16 games on the platform right now, but some of those games were put there by the likes of major social game creators like Zynga, Wooga, EA and Playdom. Wagemans, formerly an executive on Microsoft's Bing team, went on to say that Rovio has grown faster in the past two years than companies like MySpace, YouTube, Amazon and Skype. He also said, "We are now the fastest-growing consumer brand in history," ATD reports.

When you think about it, though: Not only is the Angry Birds game on nearly every gaming platform under the sun, but the little wingless cartoons and their amorphous green piglet enemies have been transformed into plush toys, t-shirts, board games, cook books, a feature film--need I go on?

During his talk in Seattle, Wageman revealed that Rovio welcomes over 120 million monthly Angry Birds players across the myriad of platforms the game is available on. Simply put, the western world is hooked on Angry Birds (it's science, remember?) and soon so will the East, if Rovio has any say in it. Sure, that's less than half of the 273 million or so monthly players Zynga caters to on Facebook alone, to which Wageman said, "We haven't even launched on Facebook yet." Oh ... oh, no.

[Image Credit: FuckYeahAlbuquerque]

Are you one of the 120 million or more devoted Angry Birds fans? Do you think Rovio could compete directly with Zynga when Angry Birds launches on Facebook?