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Five Prescriptions for Viral Games
 Design Games with Fan Sites in Mind
The better you support fans, the easier it is for a product to sell itself. One fan site can lead to substantial word-of-mouth. However, supporting fans is no longer a discussion only for the marketing department: forward-looking game designers are now investigating how fans can be supported with the underlying game design and implementation. Supporting fan sites means more than giving them marketing materials and a news-feed. Games need to be designed to expose more of their content and data so that there's a reason for people to return to fan sites more often.
Above, we discussed how a spectator-aspect could be added to games to make them more viral; distributing such content through fan sites would be natural. In addition, it isn’t hard to other information available that would be of great interest to fan sites. If a game features any ranking information (player-versus-player oriented games, RTS, FPS, and so forth) or character information (roleplaying games, massive or otherwise), any of this can be shared through the Web.
To really take advantage of this, don’t simply publish ranking and character information to a website: expose it using XML interfaces, and then provide some example code (using something popular and simple like php is best) that shows them how to manipulate the data. This will help you foster a community of fan sites who not only present useful information—but also provide value-add in terms of their own ways of sorting and querying the data.
World of Warcraft's data-driven Armory
Let them surprise you with the type of applications they build around the game-data, and you’ll be rewarded with an active community that not only supports the game but also creates a huge amount of free publicity. Making this type of data available is what has helped Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment foster very active player-run communities.
Avoid thinking of fan sites as an exclusive mouthpiece of only one product. A number of companies attempt to lock-in fan sites, prohibiting them from mentioning other game products or companies. This simply creates a walled garden that’s only of interest to the people who are already playing (or anticipating) your game.
The real benefit of a fan site is to bring awareness of a game product to someone who may have stumbled upon it while looking for information about another game or the genre. By exposing in-game content, gameplay or data you have an opportunity to let players know what’s fun about a game. The most helpful fan sites are those that already have an active community of alternative products.
It is best to think about your XML interfaces when you first design your databases. That way, you can avoid some time-consuming surprises later: some things that are easy to do with a relational database can require complex uses of XPath or XML/DOM later. Furthermore, the type of queries that a fan site might wish to do on the data may be different from the types of queries that you’ll do in-game—and these queries can alter how you’d approach both your indexing strategy as well as the data description. If you’d like to take advantage of the free publicity that exposing game-data through XML can provide, you’ll want to work these concerns into the earliest stages of the database architecture.
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