"More than 5 million people are playing the online word game Words With Friends on Facebook. And most of them are playing it with their moms." --- Jane McGonigal

This extract is another passage from Reality is Broken and looks at social gaming, particularly those played in internet browsers or in Facebook. This passage looks at Zynga's Words With Friends.

 

  Stronger Social Connectivity

  More than 5 million people are playing the online word game Words With Friends on Facebook. And most of them are playing it with their moms.

 

 

When the game was released in 2007, it became the first Facebook application to achieve a mass audience, and the familiarity of the gameplay was one of its main attractions. If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Words With Friends—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.¹ There’s no time limit on turns, and games stay active even when you log out of the social network. Whenever it’s your turn, Facebook sends you an alert to your home page, your e-mail, or your mobile phone.

 Here’s how one Words With Friends reviewer sums up its cross-generational appeal: “Everyone in your social network, even your mom, knows how to play Scrabble.” ² No doubt that’s why so many of the online rave reviews include the phrase “my mom”—like this one: “I live in Atlanta, and my mom’s in Texas. We love to have game night across the miles. Although I am sure she needs a break from me kicking her butt all of the time. (Love you, Mom!)”³

 I’ve been reading game reviews for most of my life and I’ve never seen anything close to this many mom references. In fact, it’s not that much of a stretch to say that, for many, the primary reason they play Words With Friends is to have an excuse to talk to their mom every day.

 It’s not just online reviews that have given me this suspicion—there’s photographic evidence as well. Words With Friends games are private, but players often post screenshots of their most triumphant moments on photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket. In these screenshots, which usually have titles like “Online Scrabble with Mom” or “In Which I Beat My Mother at Words With Friends,” you get a glimpse of the kind of everyday familial checking-in that runs alongside the wordplay.⁴ Much of the chat is mundane game talk, but you also see a constant stream of catching up, like these messages spied on Flickr: “Have you started your internship yet? How is that going?”⁵ and “Knee still hurt. Putting a lot of ice on it.”⁶ Or “What are you doing after work?” and “Your stepfather says hello.”⁷ Some chat messages simply express users’ happiness to be playing together, like this one from a mom to two daughters: “Glad to see you two, even if you do spank me when we play. :)”⁸ Of course, there are tons of messages that simply say: “I love you.”⁹

 Judging from the shared screenshots, it’s not just moms whom players use Words With Friends to keep in touch with daily. There are also plenty of running games against dads, cousins, siblings, in-laws, former coworkers, faraway friends, and spouses on business trips. (That’s when I most frequently play Words With Friends—I keep a game running against my husband when I’m traveling for work. It helps me feel like we’re actually doing something together, not just checking in.)

 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.

 The tight-knit nature of the Words With Friends game world wasn’t a necessary outcome of the game’s design. On Facebook, you can technically start a Words With Friends game with anyone—even people you don’t know—but most people play against people they already count as Facebook “friends.” Playing Words With Friends is checking in with our loved ones, but with a purpose. For anyone who has ever needed a gentle reminder to stay in touch, Words With Friends provides a motivation. It helps us stay actively connected, by reminding us that it’s literally “our turn” to say something. And when there’s a game on the line, suddenly staying in touch is not just pleasant and gratifying—it is also addictive.

 The secret to the addictiveness of Words With Friends is its asynchronous gameplay: players don’t have to be online at the same time, and can take their turns whenever they want. Some Words With Friends games go quickly, with players trading words every few minutes, but many games go quite slowly, with players taking just one or two turns a day, or even less often than that.

 The unpredictable rhythm of asynchronous play adds a measure of anticipation. You’re thinking about your next play, but you don’t know when you’ll be able to make it. You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”¹⁰

 The addictiveness of the game pushes us to initiate social interaction with members of our extended social network whom we might ordinarily leave out of our daily life online. Indeed, starting a new game with someone is making a commitment to interact with them at least a dozen or so times in the near future. And when you’ve got five or ten or twenty games going at once, you’ve effectively scheduled hundreds of microinteractions with people you like into your everyday routine.

 According to user metrics reported in an article in the Wall Street Journal, on average one-third of registered Words With Friends players at any given time have logged in at least thirty straight days in a row.¹¹ This is a measure of the remarkable stickiness of social network gaming—it capitalizes brilliantly on the increased motivation we feel when we play a good game. It leverages our increased interest and optimism to help us satisfy our often otherwise thwarted desire to feel more connected with friends and family.

 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.

 Eric Weiner, an independent foreign correspondent and author of The Geography of Bliss, has covered happiness trends throughout the world. His research has confirmed for him that “our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors.... Happiness is not a noun or verb. It’s a conjunction. Connective tissue.”¹² Games like Words With Friends are intentionally designed to strengthen the connective tissue within our social networks. Each move we make in the game is a conjunction.

 We clearly need more social conjunctions in our lives. As numerous economists and positive psychologists have observed, globally we make the mistake of becoming less social the richer we become as individuals, and as a society. As Weiner observes: “The greatest source of happiness is other people—and what does money do? It isolates us from other people. It enables us to build walls, literal and figurative, around ourselves. We move from a teeming college dorm to an apartment to a house and, if we’re really wealthy, to an estate. We think we’re moving up, but really we’re walling off ourselves.”¹³

 Games like Words With Friends can help us start chipping away at those walls. Words With Friends was the first breakthrough social network game, but since its success, the genre has experienced dramatic growth—particularly on Facebook.