Social Network Gaming: The Conclusion, Part 1

I am very proud to say that I have finished the first month of One Hobby at a Time, and the very first hobby. I have learned a lot about social network gaming, time management and blogging. I clocked in 36 posts in a month, not to shabby for a guy with 2 kids, a wife, and a full-time job. I also learned a lot about the Blogger platform, including its advantages and limitations. I would go on, but I think I'll make that a separate post.

anyway, lets talk social network gaming.

Social network gaming, in my honest opinion, was the wrong name for this hobby. I should have called it "casual gaming". The social network part of these games have been large, but in the end, they are casual games that can plug into your social network. If anything, it makes them more like an MMO more than a social networking game.

Time Consumption: 7/10

By themselves, the social networking games do not necessarily take a lot of time (with the exception of FrontierVille), however adding 2 or 3 of them together can cause things to get thrown way out of proportion and 5 hours later you wonder how you could have possibly spent 5 hours planing corn, or clobbering snakes.

Many of the games employ energy, like Mafia Wars and FrontierVille, which from first sight appear to
cause the game to be less time consuming, but that could not be less true. Once you waste your energy, you have to wait for your energy to refill, and while your energy is re-filling the game is going on without you re-growing. If you don't login before your energy fills up, you will waste what could be energy, and end up getting behind. This forces you to have to login every several hours to micro-manage your frontier, or mafia.

The asynchronous competitive games probably require the least amount of time to play and enjoy. Which is fine, except for games like Words with Friends when you have to wait for your friends to play, which could take hours or days, causing you to loose interest.

Costs: 3/10

Cost is a slippery slope with social networking games. The games themselves are free-to-play, but in order to purchase special accessories, or complete certain quests, you need to purchase special currency that you can only buy with real money. You get a lot of currency for the little bit of money you spend, but you need to be careful because some of the games have so much content, you will easily find that the currency does not go far.

I found out that I spent about 80% of my paid currency to complete quests, that could have been completed with time, or help from friends. That left only 20% for actually buying things that you can't buy with in game currency.

Overall Enjoyment: 7/10

The more you play, the more you enjoy, it is as simple as that. The more you play, the more money you get, the more you can build, the more you can brag to your 5 friends that actually play the same game you do.

I was immediately drawn to the simulation games, and probably had the most enjoyment with them. next would be the asynchronous competitive and then dead last, casual role playing. I was never good at the Sims, but I felt that the simulation games I played were a good pace for me. There were lots of things to do, and very little consequences for neglecting things. I played 2 very different asynchronous competitive games, but felt that they brought a very similar amount of enjoyment. Whether it was getting a high score in Bejeweled Blitz, or hitting the triple word score in Words with Friends, I had fun.The casual role playing games just didn't provide a lasting experience. It became a mess of repetitive micro-management that doesn't seem to end.

Technical Skill Required: 2/10

If you can click a mouse, you can play social network games. Each game had its own way of teaching the user how to play the game.

I'm going to stop here, and put the rest in another post.

Words with Friends: Day 30

Like Bejeweled Blitz, I had experience playing this game prior to this July's hobby. I had been playing it with a couple of friends, so once the month started I just continued as I had previously.

I have mixed feelings about this game. I liked it because it required a lot of critical thinking and is based upon a highly thought after board game, but at the same time, it opens itself up to cheating and using the system. What do I mean by using the system? I mean if you can keep trying different combinations until you find a word it accepts. Also, your not playing face to face with someone, so you can go to a website like this one and become Shakespeare without lifting a finger.

When your doing well, your proud of yourself for being so smart, but when your doing poorly, you either think the game is after you, or your opponent is obviously cheating. A good bit of the game is luck however. Being able to get that "s" to extend a word while making a new one or pop that "q" on a triple word score and blow your opponents mind.

This game does not utilize social networks for anything other than finding players. Once the game is started however, its just between you and your opponent. I noticed that as time goes on, I'm getting tired of playing the game. Not necessarily because of loosing, but because I don't really feel like playing scrabble every day, I just don't; and based upon the involvement from my friends in the last week of the month, I think they feel the same way too.

Solid game, easy, but I think the next time I play scrabble, I would prefer to play it on a game board without the Internet and other methods of enhancing your game.

Here are Screenshots from my matches:

FarmVille for iPhone is Croppy

In order to supplement the time needed in the evening to catch up with the social network games, I have been using my iPhone to farm my crops to and from work. The app itself is simpler than the web version, and in some cases it is also faster. In the web version, you have a little farmer avatar that needs to walk to the plot to harvest and plant, but on the iPhone, they just start harvesting themselves. This would be all fine and well if you didn't have to attempt to do it 2 or 3 times, which brings me to its faults.

If you do not have perfect 3g connection, you will find yourself in the same boat as me. Time and time again, I will get home from work, login to FarmVille, and see that not a single crop has been harvested from the morning. After being burned several times, I now harvest and replant my crops, manually shutdown the app, restart the app, and see if the changes actually took effect or if I have to attempt to do it all over again.

The only silver lining, is that when it works, its the only Zynga app that actually connects to your Facebook FarmVille farm, instead of creating a new one that only lives on your Phone.