"...a genuinely meaningful social mechanic can create its own share of problems. Facebook friends are not necessarily one’s actual friends. Players often announce their names and character details in various forums, hoping to find “fake friends” to fill out their list. Doing so creates three advantages. First, the more friends the player has, the more opportunities for his character to be borrowed and thus earn friend gold for the player. Second, high-level friends make combat far easier because of their high stats and upgraded skills. Finally, a surplus of friends allows the player to bypass the rest time restriction." How do you get around all this? Johnson explains all. It's a really lovely piece of genuinely social game design.

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it... you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?

"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people... Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."

Oh my. Slides from Ludicorp's presentation in which they launched Flickr at ETech 2004. So much that's still so relevant, still not always understood. Wish I could just throw this at people at Develop instead of my talk.

"Lionhead's system acknowledges the social context of co-op that other games ignore, and the bargaining over who gets to be the hero and how much the henchman is paid is a crucial part of the fun." It's all about the context; aninteresting take on co-op.

Absolutely excellent. A little depressed but also pleased at the overlap with my NLGD talk. Here's hoping I can munge together something good. And give credit where credit is due.

Not every social software system has all of these, but most of them have three or more. And the most popular social websites implement many of these building blocks, but focus on just one or two.

Surprisingly good (for .net) interview with Caterina Fake. “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.”

"the strength of social contact between people cannot be measured by frequency or intensity; a better measure is the number of communication channels used by people" - I like Chris' ideas, but need to think a bit harder on them.

Jason Kottke brings all manner of Will-Wright-related goodness together in one post. Hence: linky linky.