W12 : Social Games and Communities.

Facebook is such an influent platform in the cyber world. It has changed the behaviour of the society, and the way in which we use social networking. Many papers deal with the impact on users, fears created, the danger of Facebook, or the privacy. What is happening inside this profiles sphere ?  Few societies, agencies, companies bet a lot on this website and his users. Firstly, friends were just adding other friends, and they sere sharing data and pictures. Progressively, information was coming to us. Were we lazier ? Do we get interest about something else that mad us forget about Google ? So personalised ads appeared, such as Groups and Games. If I have a good memory, Groups were only created by users themselves. About the rest of the world, it was to important for them to skip this society phenomenon. So communicants decided to include Facebook in their boucle of marketing / communication strategy. What for ? To create more networks, more communities, to foster customers loyalties. It is an easiest way to stay in touch with their potential client, smart isn’t it ? Do we still believe that we have the control of our life, specially now they have access to our personal data ? So what about “Social Games” ? According to Nick O’Neill, it is better to define social games in five points, such as : turn-based, awareness of others’ actions in games, casual gaming, multiplayer, and based on social platforms. We can guess that the main goal is to be fun and attractive, playing with other users to touch this notion of community. The weird feeling is usually, games mean to be in contact we the other players, more particular when it is mentioned social. You are expecting to see someone. This is wrong, the only social thing is all players who subscribed earlier to this game are gathered into this game. But not everyone has to be there at the same time, which is quite funny because his (or her) avatars are still in action. Are we loosing the common definition of game ? Even if it said social games, there is this screen that separate us and mark the limit between the real and digital life. If we extrapolate a little bite, we can get this kind of scene with our new smart phones and these applications / social games. And the worth thing is this notion of presence has to be questioned again. Then, to continue in the same direction, there is community, which is an important section to Facebook. Users who launch a group have to be careful to many elements such as the membership, the growth or the evolution.