Hugh MacLeod talks a lot about social objects on his blog — he strongly believes they’re the future of marketing. Social objects are objects that people gather socially around or talk about. If you’re bringing your new iPhone to your friends and showing it to them, it serves as a social object; if you geek out with friends by chatting about Lord of the Rings, LotR is the social object. You can read more details on the whole thing here.
The relevance of social objects to marketing is obvious: if people keep interacting socially around what you’re selling, you’ll be getting great word of mouth. Even if you don’t care about marketing — you should, but that’s a post for another day — making games that are social objects is really interesting. Wouldn’t you want to have communities of people interacting together because of your creation?
Multiplayer games are prime social objects: they bring people around them and whole social networks are created by fans of those games. Lots of people play World of Warcraft mainly to do something with their friends, for example. Xbox Live is a huge social network with some people making lots of friends, not unlike Facebook or MySpace. Party games like Guitar Hero and Wii Sports are other good examples.
Single Player games are not as easy to turn into social objects. How do you create social interactions around games that are played alone? Some games did it:
- Pokémon: The game is single player, but it encourages players to trade with their friends. Kids in schoolyards everywhere huddled up together to trade their cartoony monsters to “catch them all”.
- Donkey Kong Country: This SNES platformer had over 100 secret areas — they were hidden everywhere and the game encouraged you to find them all. That’s hard to do alone, but if you teamed up with a few of your friends you could figure it out much quicker — instant social object.
- The hardware demo games: Those games were perfect to demonstrate the awesome power of your new computer or new console: Doom, Unreal and Gears of War are all good example of those games. Even if you play the game in single player, you’re still interacting with your friends when you show them the graphics.
The key to turn a single player game into a social object is to put something to share in it, be it tradeable items, secrets, awesome graphics or something else. If there’s something worth sharing in your games, players will get together and soon enough you’ll have communities appearing around your game.