user created entertainment in social game play

Two worlds are colliding at the moment: Gaming and the social web.
I’m not talking about putting a game on a web page. Nor, is it about publishing a game on a social network with the appropriate viral marketing and friend invite mechanics built in. Its not even about playing a game against your friends like in scrabulous.

Something new is being born.

Games are, traditionally, completely closed worlds that people play in. Every aspect of a game is considered, designed, and controlled. On the other hand, the social web is an open world. People are given the tools to create, share, and manage their own content in order to create the experience they want.

At the intersection of these two paradigms, you get what i’m calling user created entertainment in social game play. Our game is a good example of this new type of social play.

A great anecdote of user created play is the following:
In our game, we give people the ability to send gold to each other. We didn’t try to think of how to create a mini-game out of sending gold. Its a pretty straightforward feature. As a war game, we also allow people to attack each other. A bit ago, some user found a player who was cheating. This player had created fake facebook accounts to add these fake players to his kingdom in order to boost his power. He had named his fake accounts as ogres. The user who found this fake account, in an inspired, bored, and angry moment created a game called the “Great Ogre Hunt.” He put a bounty on the “Ogre King” and said he would pay a gold reward for people who successfully attacked this player, stole an “ogre” and sent it to him. This became a popular and hilarious discussion topic. Many people joined in and tried to hunt down the “Ogre King” by maneuvering their kingdoms within attack range. Its called bracket surfing in our in-game lingo. Even those who couldn’t, watched from the sidelines and kept announcing where the “Ogre King” was so others could keep the hunt going.

Other users have created virtual “boot camps” to “train” newbies. Some host their own contests, like giving 10k gold for the best jokes. Most often, someone is bored, so they come up with a creative idea to get some entertainment.

As a result, a lot of genuine and humorous moments have spawned from this kind of play. This has, in turn, helped create a strong online community filled with interesting events and fun to pursue.

The key differentiator here is not just the idea of creating tools for play, but to also stay away from creating motivations and reasons for users to do things. Let your users figure out their own reasons for doing what they do.