Facebook and the Merging of Games and Social Networks

Gamasutra has an in-depth interview with Gareth Davis, Facebook's platform manager, about how social networks and online gaming are intersecting more and more as each industry matures. He says, "There's a cultural shift towards people being willing, excited, and preferring to use their real world identities online. We all know that 10 years ago, you were as anonymous as possible online, right? And today, we spend a lot of our time putting our real world identities out there and sharing them ... And we've seen this occur on Facebook.com, where as more and more people join Facebook and your social graph is more complete, you have the ability to have these social experiences with people you've never had before, and you're playing games with people whom you didn't play games with before, with your family members, with your parents, with friends in remote locations. There's this new gaming activity happening that we believe will translate to the consoles as well."

Real world identities

[sam0vi]

And today, we spend a lot of our time putting our real world identities out there and sharing them

I must say that even though i (lightly) use social sites i take great care in maintaining my real identity as obscure as possible, so only people who know me can recognize me. I can proudly say that if i google my full name it yields 0 results. How many of you can say that??

Disclaimer: I'm from Spain, and here we have two last names, making collisions harder (e.g. John Smith)

Re:Real world identities

[icebraining]

I get about 20 results, but all from my college internal pages. I would think grades should at least be protected by robots.txt, but not for them, apparently.

But my nickname never appears connected to my real name, thankfully.

Re:Real world identities

[DoofusOfDeath]

I can proudly say that if i google my full name it yields 0 results. How many of you can say that??

I'm not going to spend the time deep-diving on this one, but you're being a little overconfident, I think. Here's just a guess about you:

• You use Ubuntu [ubuntuforums.org]
• You like Joan Baez [www.last.fm]
• You [ubuntuforums.org] have an LG e500 laptop,
• You're uploaded some torrents to Minonova [mininova.org]
• You might live in Virginia [ubuntuforums.org] or Ohio [ubuntuforums.org], or maybe Georgia [ubuntuforums.org]

Games? They're pesonality tests.

[Fantastic Lad]

I was talking to an old programmer who has done some pretty, um. . , interesting jobs in the past, who told me that one of the Facebook silent partners is indeed you know who. (Do not speak IT's name.)

So long as the information flows, the whole system will have all the funding it needs, as has clearly been the case thus far.

You're right though, this new trend towards trying to encourage gaming in social networks does seem a little. . , I don't know. . , desperate, like, "Come on you little white mice! We built all these cool experi- um, 'games' for you to play. Go on, play them. Please?"

I mean, shite, when ALL the games are basically personality tests. . . Even just selling that kind of info to marketing firms would have been profitable enough.

-FL

Re:He's not being manipulative at all. Much.

[drinkypoo]

Why? I mean what's the draw? You give out information to make life easier for the adbots and identity thieves, you tie up all your contact list in someone's proprietary database, and in return you get ... what, precisely?

The opportunity to find long-lost friends, which is more important than most of that other shit anyway. It's already pathetically easy to find out things about me, or most anyone else. I need friends more than I need it to be one tenth of one percent harder to steal my useless, indebted, tax-encumbered identity. Maybe if I had really good credit I'd be more concerned. Anyone who steals my identity is going to end up in the hole.