I got a surprise the other day when checking out one of the newer features of Facebook. While playing one game, I looked over at my games feed and saw someone who usually sticks to PopCap Facebook games had started playing a game called “Pig Up.” Intrigued, I searched it, and what I found was pretty awesome…

Right now on Facebook, there is a preview available of a new PopCap creation called Pig Up. Finally, the long time dream of pigs to take to the skies is coming to reality. Launch your pig from the pickup truck cannon with his little makeshift wooden wings and flap to cover major distance and earn some pig pence. Of course it’s not a game without a challenge, so bring in the mean bees. Bees hover with their stingers out and then charge, taking away precious flaps. But, eat some apples along the way to gain them back. Click over now to see how far you can go!

We are always looking for ways to keep our minds sharp as we get older, and Bejeweled Blitz may have just joined the ranks of crossword puzzles and Sudoku as tools to help us do that. A recent survey study of more than 10,000 U.S. adults suggests that playing Bejeweled Blitz regularly could enhance mental sharpness and pattern recognition in adults over 50.

This survey, which is the first in a series that takes a rare look at the cognitive benefits of video game playing on adults over 50, focuses on Bejeweled Blitz and the tasks the game sets on the brain, including quick decision making, visual searching, and reaction time. Sharpness in performing other tasks was the benefit seen most often – 47.2% in people over 50. Pattern recognition was reported most in adults over 65, as well as the ability to perform timed tasks more quickly.

The results were presented by PopCap Games and University of Massachusetts Amherst psychology researcher Susan K. Whitbourne, Ph.D. at this year’s American Psychological Association convention in Washington, DC., and were well received by fellow researchers attending. Dr. Walter Boot, director of the Attention and Training Lab of the Department of Psychology at Florida State University, stated “I believe the work Dr. Whitbourne and her colleagues are doing, using Bejeweled Blitz, is both critical and exciting, and that more research like this needs to be done exploring not only the types of games that bring about cognitive benefits, but also the types of games older adults are willing to play and why. The best cognitive aging intervention in the world is useless if older adults aren’t willing and able to engage in it. By investigating attitudes and perceived benefits of video game interventions, this research has the potential to discover game interventions that are both effective and enjoyable.”

It will be interesting to see what comes from the remaining surveys in the series and whether or not any of them spark more research into this potential, such as including new hands on studies with people who haven’t ever played before. But maybe that’s the next step… actually evaluating Bejeweled Blitz’s effectiveness as a tool for cognitive improvement after investigating its potential. Of course, all I really have to say is that I hope Bejeweled Blitz is still around when I am 65 .

Zynga has finally brought the crazy popular Scrabble-esque app, Words With Friends, to Facebook! I have been playing this since I got my iPod touch and am completely obsessed by it. It”s incredibly easy to get started, just go to the app, find some friends who play, and start a game. The thing I like best about this adaptation is that you CAN take it with you. Start playing a game on Facebook, and that same game carries over to your iPhone or Droid. It’s free (with ads) and truly social, with a chat built in. Enjoy!

Little Cave Hero is a sort of throwback to pixellated games of my youth with a twist of sociality. Your town has been ravaged by monsters and it’s up to you to put it back together and build it back up to help make the mayor look good again. The games starts players out getting used to mining the caves for treasure, completing missions for the mayor, and rebuilding the necessary components to start the town running and pump up population. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the exaggerated pixelation of the game, but before too long, it grew on me. Now when I play, I find it endearing and nostalgic.

The beginning of the game feels good. The character of the mayor is humerous, and spouts some witty remarks. The missions come fast and are completable in a reasonable amount of time, which adds to a sense of accomplishment. Jean’s town, which is the stable, even if you have no friends who play, you have this friend and this friend has been playing since inception so the world is inspiring sort of town, gives a glimpse of possibilities of what’s to come and the different things that can be done when rebuilding and repopulating.

Like many games, especially in the Facebook arena, leveling up in the beginning happens quickly enough to keep playing a little longer (as energy gets replenished when leveling up). Once that starts to slow down, the familiar feeling of the Facebook limits sets in. Without many friends to visit to collect additional energy, playtime is occasionally disappointing, especially because it takes sometimes a lot of energy to finish caves or challenges. But paying attention to the XP bar helps keep strategy in line to level up and be able to play longer. Building the town up, fortunately, and redecorating or moving things around, getting production of wood, refining ores, etc. are things that don’t take up energy. However, they don’t add too much play time because the production takes time, and often one thing needs producing before others can be produced. If there are more friends added to your population, however, the building/producing time decreases, which would help quite a bit.

The game is entirely click and play. Click where the hero should go, what the hero should break through, monsters the hero should attack. This makes it simple and accessible for multiple connections and gadgets. Sometimes the towns become mazes and there are characters and creatures that get in the way. So little hero just stops. If this happens in the hero’s own town, though, anything, even critters and characters can be moved anywhere in the town with the handy editing tool. The editing feature not only helps get heroes unstuck, but also organizes and reorganizes the town, enables selling and rotating of items to get the look just right.

There are a few other ways to help make each hero’s town unique, from purchasable decorations, fencing, roads, and even animals, to the edit feature which allows just about anything in the town to be moved, rotated one of two ways, or even sold. But the thing that allows for the most individuality is the design studio. In the design studio, players can make and customize decorations such as an apple, snail, lion, bookshelf, bed, or anything they can build. This, I believe, is the thing that adds the most time possibility if more time in the game is desired. These items are also savable and can be placed in the town at any time.

The social aspect of the game includes the ability to share gifts with friends, which initially seems possible only when the game first loads, but now I see a little gift icon on the side of the screen while playing, which does open up the option. Also, visiting friends and talking to their icons gives some xp, coins, and energy. Once energy is full, though, it doesn’t add more and the “visit” is wasted. There are some maintenance actions that can be done to earn more coins and xp in friends’ towns as well. Presently, I have only friends who seem to play the game very occasionally, so the social aspect is not incredibly high.

All in all, I like playing Little Cave Hero. Though it does have a similar feeling and premise to other social games, the variety of activities keeps it interesting. It is, however, an easy game to let fall by the wayside as sometimes it takes more effort to keep up with than the reward feeling of playing it. It’s cute, entertaining at times, and has potential. I would say give it a shot, especially if you have friends that already play, or would be willing to play. Note that the game is still in Beta. It will be interesting to see

King.com has compiled a Mahjong adventure Facebook users have been waiting for in Mahjong Saga. Mahjong Saga has users follow the lead of a Sensei Panda through a 100+ level progressive adventure that offers challenge in both puzzle solving and time. Players start out with 5 energy and can keep recovering energy by achieving a 3 star time solution, which is a good way to be able to continue playing. The game starts out almost ridiculously easy to get players warmed up, but quickly progresses to challenge even the most seasoned Mahjong players. Challenge your friends and see how you measure up!

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I think my favorite talk of the day at Casual Connect had to be The State of Social in Social Games led by Aki Jarvinen, Creative Director, Ph.D., of Digital Chocolate. He gave this talk at Casual Connect in Europe and the organizers had to have a repeat here in Seattle this summer.

There have been questions as to whether social games are really games, as well as how social social games really are. This discussion, addressed both of these, but really focused on how social social games are, starting out by posing the question – is social broken?

Social gaming in the developing world has been compared to passing notes under the door with friends instead of actually meeting face to face, or parallel play among toddlers. Both of these made sense to me. Yes, when we play social games with our friends, we aren’t face to face, which means that we are largely playing social games on our own, checking in on each other once in a while. Most of the time, we aren’t playing at the same time, which is, I think, the point. How can we expect social games to be completely social if they have to be built on people playing at different times?

Jarvinen focused in on the elements necessary for social relationships, including communication, bonding, social presence, and social space. The nature of social platforms takes away from a lot of what these require. Communication is the basis for any kind of relationship. Without communication, there can’s be any kind of intimacy. In most social games, there isn’t any true way to communicate while playing. This is the main thing I miss. Most communication sent between friends through social games is controlled by the game. True, sometimes there is the ability to “add a personal message,” but the personal message gets easily lost in the point of the game’s message, which is often “Dawn has sent you a gift in…” I would like a place to be able to chat or play cooperatively if it just so happens that we are playing at the same time. This would provide a much richer social atmosphere, but may not add any virality or monetization to the game (might even take away some of this), which is from the developer/publisher standpoint, the important thing. Luckily, the most popular social platforms have a chat built in to them, so if we don’t mind not playing in full screen mode, which takes away from the game experience, we can chat with friends who are playing, adding to the social experience.

But this does get back to the subject of social presence. Social presence requires immediacy. That is the main thing that social networks in general, social gaming included, are missing for lack of a better word – hence the passing of the note under the door. But I think instead of thinking of it as missing immediacy, we should think of it as filing in empty space in relationships when social presence is not available or possible.

So, I focused in on what the social point is in social games. True, there are aspects of social games that are both enhancing the social front and putting up obstacles to both the social experience of the game and the social experience of the platform. The obstacles, funny enough, present themselves as additional ways to interact with friends, but are really designed to create a viral thread for the game to expand on. Sure, they can sometimes add to the experience of the game individually, but they don’t really increase the social experience of the game. In fact, in some cases, these can put up barriers for friends within the social platform who don’t play, and who also don’t like their news feed spammed by someone “sharing” their achievements or asking for “help” with a task.

If social gaming means that we are playing a game on our own, simply taking a minute once in a while once in a while to check in on how a friend’s game is going, giving them a hand or a gift to help them out, perhaps it’s more appropriately called shared gaming. There may not be the optimal social activity there, but visiting a friend’s board, farm, neighborhood, or aquarium does offer a different way to connect with them outside of our normal relationship, but not instead of our normal relationship. I think this is the point that is missed when people start talking about social gaming. Because hey, if my friend isn’t home, if they live far away, or if we work opposite hours, I would rather pass a note under the door than lose them completely.

What do you think? What could make social games more social? Or are they social enough as they are?

Stay tuned for The Add Me Culture…

One of the most interesting things for me this year at Casual Connect was going to some of the discussions. Because Casual Connect is more for people in the industry, or people trying to work their way into the industry, I got a peek behind the curtain at what goes in to making casual and social games, some of the psychology, some of the business. This particular talk was given by Greg Mills from Digital Chocolate – makers of one of my favorite social games, “Zombie Lane.”

Now, if you have ever played a social game – particularly on Facebook – you have noticed that they are largely free to play. However, when push comes to shove, it’s difficult to get very far very fast when you play with no paid content. There is a multitude of ways to spend Facebook credits within many games that help move things along and level up more frequently, whether it’s buying basic units of energy in energy based games, or in game currency, or purchasing customizations or upgraded weapons to use less energy to start with. For those of us with competitive friends, these items are very tempting indeed.

Of course, those of us who do enjoy playing for free, the “freeloaders” as you will, do generate some cost to the system. So, basically this talk was to describe ways to monetize us without “cannibalizing” the “whales” – people who do pay to play. Of course, this is a sticky situation from a developer standpoint, but what about from a consumer standpoint? Chances are the 90% or so of us who don’t pay for content never will, or maybe we will buy one or two virtual goods here and there. So, how will our gaming experience change – or how does it differ from those few who do pay?

One of the points made clear by Greg Mills is that virtual goods and advertizing are both equally important. We will continue to see a push for us to start or continue to buy an energy pack here and there or a shiny new weapon. And those banner ads on the page that don’t interfere with the game aren’t going anywhere any time soon. However, he did bring up a few new ways some companies may bring in some advertising dollars.

One way is a preroll ad. We may start seeing advertisements while the game is loading, whether it be a static ad or a short video. These already exist in places like broadcasting network websites in order for us to be able to watch a clip or full episode of a show, we watch an ad beforehand – supposedly while the clip is loading. For me, this is not really disruptive for the playing experience. It seems to be a system in which the developers can easily put in for freeloaders and not for whales. For this option, it seems to simply be a matter of who will start putting them in first – a when, not if, scenario. I don’t expect it to take too long.

The other way he talked about, which is a little more intriguing to me, is more incentivized ads. Incentivized ads provide some sort of reward for clicking through to a website or watching an ad. Though these are potentially more disruptive, they are a greater win for all parties concerned. Players first and foremost get a choice whether or not to watch the ad or click through, but they also get a reward for choosing to, usually a good they would normally have to spend a small bit of money for, such as the ability to gift land mines to friends, or 5 extra energy. From the developer standpoint, these ads tend to pay out at a higher rate, since people are actively paying exclusive attention to the ads, which is a greater win companies advertising. These ads do exist already in some games. I, for one, think this is a good compromise for playing for free. A little bit of time and brain clutter for an increased ability to be competitive sounds like a pretty good bargain to me.

What do you think? How intrusive do you think advertising is on the gaming experience, and is it a fair trade to sit through ads in order to not pay for playing? Do you pay money to play these types of games in order to avoid advertising or in order to be able to play more?

Impressions

In the beginning of the day, Things were a little overwhelming. Attendance was definitely up at Casual Connect this year.
But, while pushing through the clusters of people, an overwhelming sense of familiarity took over. It kind of felt like coming home. Though this year, I took a little different strategy to my single day of attendance. I wanted to listen to some panels and see where things sat in the industry instead of trying to meet with a bunch of people singularly. I think this worked out well, and I am anxious to share what I heard, including some of the psychology behind game development, the subtle ways they keep free social games free, and the quality and quantity of social behavior in so called social games.

I did meet with a couple of people singularly and am happy with what I learned. Whereas in previous years, it seemed like there was a big separation and traditional casual games were starting to have to compete with flash games, social games, and mobile games. Now it looks like they are starting to become a cohesive unit and work together interchangeably across multiple platforms. I also saw some exciting new developments in new ways to play with new technologies that work with smart TV’s.

I will say that it did seem like there was a lot of focus placed on monetization and different ways to take payments, etc. There were more and more booths and companies dedicated to this side of the business, which has some importance in a conference of this type, geared toward more industry professionals and prospective industry professionals. But from a consumer perspective, it’s not something I want to see such a big presence from.

All in all, there were some good things going on, good energy, interesting people, organization, cooperation, and innovation happening this year at Casual Connect. Stay tuned for more details and specifics. I can’t wait to hear some feedback as to what some of the panelists said and the direction of the industry as a whole.