Furthermore, unlike on MMOs or casual game portals, people don't tend make new friends on social games. They've already got an established network of friends and acquaintances. Instead, this type of socializing cements existing ones. The average Facebook user has 120 friends, but would not consider them to be all close, personal friendships. Social networking sites join "weak ties," people like high school classmates and old work buddies, and encourage what psychologists call parasocial relationships. You observe snippets of people's lives, but do you really know them? For deep relationships, it seems, you still need to put in the face time and have shared experiences.

(fluff)Friends

Exceptions exist, mainly in virtual pet and virtual world simulations like (fluff)Friends and YoVille. (fluff)Friends has even had a (fluff)Con for Fluff Fanatics. Lately, (fluff)Friends has been holding (fluff)Art contests, which appeal to users' creativity, but even without these contests, the (fluff)Friends community would still eagerly upload fluff(Art) for peer ratings a la YouTube or Flickr. These activities fulfill a basic human desire for approval, self-expression, and recognition.

In fact, these human desires may be heightened when interacting with friends rather than strangers. Emotions such as competitiveness, affection, love, envy, and pride are what Playfish calls "social emotions."

"Social emotions form the basic building blocks in each of our games," says Kim Daniel Arthur, VP of Global Studios at Playfish. "This requires a new way of designing and thinking about games, from simple elements such as our friends score bars in Word Challenge to the more intricate social interactions in Pet Society." For Playfish, the social experience of a game is the primary focus.

Again, look to social psychology as to why social comparison and friend-trading games exist alongside RPGs, virtual worlds, strategy games, and casual games on social networking sites.

Bragging rights and the need for social status are a big part of this landscape, especially when a person's every move is recorded by Facebook's continual newsfeed of updates, links, videos, photos, activities, purchasing habits, game scores, likes/dislikes, and even recipe selections. "Social games are communication tools," says Shervin Pishevar, founder and CEO of SGN. "That's why they do well in a massive communication network like MySpace or Facebook."

Other games, such as the Facebook RPG Mob Wars, are stripped-down versions of PC or console games. Although an RPG, Mob Wars is a game without gameplay, in a way, because the gameplay is replaced by a button click of "Do Job." It's as if every player had a Glider autopilot program to go out and kill mobs. However, the strategic elements of deciding which task to do first and inventory management remain intact.

Tom Abernathy, Writer at Microsoft Game Studios, remarks, "It's a serviceable but not exceptional little bare bones RPG. But I can play it while I'm doing other things."

This type of passive play, called sporadic play, and asynchronous or turn-based play, says social game blogger Bret Terrill, now Director of Business Development at Zynga, is critical to the success of social games. While not prevalent on casual game portals, passive play is common on social networking sites.

However, Playfish's Who Has the Biggest Brain? and Word Challenge are basically short single-player games. Launched in December 2007 as Playfish's first title, Who Has the Biggest Brain? seems to have a permanent lock in the Top 10 of Facebook games.

For now, there doesn't seem to be a unifying characteristic among all of these games, other than they exist on social networking sites. However, I would posit that there are certain design characteristics that could make social games a unique category.

An Ideal for Social Games

Social networking sites have changed how we consume information and how we play games. It is only fitting that social games reflect the characteristics of the platform. When combined together, the social graph, ambient awareness, and inclusive play are the design characteristics that make social games distinctive to me.

While new initiatives like Facebook Connect and MySpace Data Availability will allow these applications to run outside of social networking sites, these defining characteristics are not affected due to data portability.

Social Graph

Looking back to the proposed definitions in the previous section, there is one that does describe games that cannot be played anywhere else without data portability. These are games that utilize the social graph.

Most games do pull data from the social graph for challenges and friends-only leaderboards, but some go further by incorporating the social graph into gameplay. In Parking Wars, I can park on each friend's street and in PackRat, I can browse through my friends' pages.

In order to do well in Parking Wars, I need to know the usage patterns of my friends. I find that these games have the camaraderie of a board game, in that there are conversations about the game among friends, and yet, it's not necessary for all my friends to be online at the same time to play the game.

In theory, any sort of information, like fave bands or travel photos, can be pulled from people's profiles, much like Facebook ads do on the side. Ideally, these games would require people to know something about their friends to do well. Or at least, by playing the game, people would end up knowing more about their friends.