See if this sounds familiar to you:

To play the game, you put currency into the machine. You then pull the knob and wait for the result. When the result is presented, you are rewarded with a cacophony of exciting sounds, attention-grabbing images, and some form of currency. Often times, this winning helps you progress towards a larger goal. You also have the opportunity with each play to win a rare prize of significantly higher value than the value of the currency you contributed to play the game.

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

The free-to-play online game service Gameforge now has 300 million registered users.

Wooga CEO Jens Begeman has revealed the percentage revenue split of his company's social game income, with the unexpected revelation that his audience is far more interested in saving time than buying customisation and decoration.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

GDC Vault – Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design] is a link that takes you to the GDC Vault where you can watch a full video of the presentation, with the slides side by side, for free.
Of course, you didn’t need that, right? Because you already paid to get access to the utterly awesome GDC Vault.
There are a couple more free talks released today as well, including the AI rant and an inside look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can check out all the free talks here.

At the recent LOGIN conference, I was on a panel entitled "Wannabe Farmers replacing Pretend Mass-Murderers: Are Social Games a Fad?" To make the panel more interesting the panelists took extreme positions, and I was the solid "social (network) games are a fad" guy. Not that I believe that entirely, but it made for an entertaining panel discussion. (I'll post a link when the talk is posted online.)

But, I mentioned something that I think is very true: business works in cycles. And, by looking at previous cycles we can use them to divine the future of the current cycle. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

OK. It’s Friday night and I admit I’ve had a drink or possibly two already, which means that I’m in a mood for talking and sharing, possibly more than I normally would. But sharing is a bit of the point of blogging, isn't it?

There won't be any pretence or cover-up. This is the truth, the reality the way it is, including cracks and less-than-perfect. But even if this post starts in misery, I assure you it will get much better towards the end. Don’t worry. Just have a seat and a pint and relax while I'm sharing my story, OK? And don't forget I love my guild.

Now let's get started, shall we? (Larísa fills a pint to the brim and heads for her favorite armchair, takes a sip and clears her throat before speaking up.)

Laralyn McWilliams and I gave a talk today at GDC. These are the slides for those who are interested: Intuition vs. Metrics: How Social Game Design Has Evolved.

As promised in the talk itself, here are the slides for the talk I just gave on “Social Mechanics for Social Games” — an updated version of the talk I gave back at GDC Austin.

It’s really, really easy to exceed customer expectations by doing one simple thing: Have the customer’s back. Customers want to feel like someone is on their side, and being on the customer’s side is the job of the community team.

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I'd call it a party game, except that it's a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.
I really like it. But then I go to some strange parties.

Facebook’s communication channels are central to social game distribution, retention, and engagement, but there’s rarely an opportunity to see what happens to a game when all of its communication channel access is cut off.

It has now been about a week since Facebook suspended all viral communication channels for most LOLapps games. Although changes will take a while to cycle into a monthly active user graph, an AppData graph of LOLapps’s Critter Island game’s daily active users shows why a communication channel suspension is almost as bad as an outright removal of an app

By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference entitled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the "?". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show.

Lee Sheldon is an accomplished screenwriter and game writer, having worked on TV shows like ST:TNG and Charlie's Angels as well as the Agatha Christie series of games from The Adventure Company. He now teaches game design courses for Indiana University's Department of Telecommunications. Instead of assigning his students a grade at the end of the course, he instead starts every student at 0 xp and they earn points through completing quests like solo projects and quizzes in addition to grouping up for guild projects and pick up groups. How many points they have at the end of the course determines their actual "grade."

Matthew Wiggins of mobile developer Wonderland, creator of the chart-topping Godfinger, has claimed that charging any price for an iPhone game is a mistake.

Following the Canada-only release in March, Godfinger went to no 1 in the charts in 36 hours with no promotion. It also topped the charts come its worldwide release in June.

I am supposed to talk about the relationship of aesthetics and metrics in social game design next week (at Games Convention Online in Leipzig, Germany), so I'm trying to figure out what 'aesthetics' could mean in the context of social games, especially Facebook ones. I've gone through a number of takes on aesthetics in both game design and game studies literature, and now I am in the process of trying to distill something sensible and practical out of it. By practical I mean something that could give function as high-level design drivers or principles in actual social game projects.