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Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Well instead of mobile games they may leverage the large console and desktop gamers out there and add FB accounts to those circles. Besides it may be a new revenue.

One kind of social events is gaming with friends. It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.

Undoubtedly at some point virtual reality is going to become the next "smartphone". Rift is a giant headset but in a decade or two it will get so small that we can enjoy virtual reality at home like we enjoy using a smartphone.

This feels more and more like getting your virtual character in SIMs to play virtual reality game.

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> It's nice to compete with friends and show to your network what you and your friends are up to.

I've never understood this mindset in gaming. Maybe I'm just showing myself as an introverted curmudgeon, but I only game when I'm not programming, and I just game to try to unwind. Being forced to do something 'social' when I just want to relax is just annoying to me personally.

I'm not saying I hate other people (I do), or that I don't want to ever be social (I don't), but social situations -- while often fun -- do require more mental energy than just shooting bad guys, or scoring goals, or whatever else the game has you doing.

Maybe I'm very unrepresentative of the gaming market at large, but I don't understand why numerous gaming companies (Sony and Microsoft have both headed down this path) want to cram social aspects into games. I'm not sure what they think the business case for that decision is. I assume they think it'll make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love, but that just makes me want to play games less.

If you look at the size of Twitch.tv and lots of game-related subreddits, it's obvious that "social gaming" is a very big market with a lot of potential money to be made.

The trick is that "social gaming" does not mean what many seem to think it means.

Watch a live stream of Scott Manley having some beers and flying some kerbals to the Mun? Sure, I'm on board with that.

Receive a notification that my mother has topped her previous high score in [who cares]Ville? No. No not at all.

I've seen absolutely no indication that Facebook understands that "social gaming" should not mean "annoying your friends".

Why is what you want the only thing that is worth doing? What about the people who do care that their mom topped their previous score in [they care]Ville?

Whoever those people are, I don't want them in my "friends" list.

Nobody can be in your friends list without your consent.

Let's see, one involves spamming people who don't care, the other only involves people who do.. [shit]Ville spam games aren't social gaming, they are anti-social gaming.

Not to mention, what is the context of this discussion? Rift. What does Rift have to do with [shit]Ville spam games? Fuck all.

You have a valid point there, but you certainly can play by yourself and hopefully there is a way to opt-out or silent game update after integration.

make games something more essential to day-to-day life than they currently are, by connecting games to the people you love

Certainly. For example, friend quizzes on Facebook.

I don't know what game makes sense to people. I try to be open-minded and play as many type genres as possible, whether it is FPS, MMRPG or puzzles. Disclaimer: I love minecraft.

I imagine they might push social VR games similar to Google's Ingress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_%28game%29) further. This seems to be an increasing trend. I just read about NYC's Easter Egg hunt last week (http://www.easteregghuntsandevents.org/NY_Easter.php). Similar to Verizon's finding smartphone around the country and Ingress. Scavenger hunt, basically.

The only problem with my social network is that most people in my FB circle don't play games. Even if they do they don't play the games I play... That's always an unsolvable problem. Another problem is I don't want to download a 10GB game. We'd have to wait for super-awesome-cloud-gaming-infrastructure to deliver that to us. We are still early in that direction.

"want to cram social aspects into games"

Long term relationship because gaming can only happen at slow social speeds rather than fast individual speeds. That means more milking subscription money out.

Playing thru the Halflife story / drama with your friends sounds superficially interesting. Then you realize you can only go as fast as your slowest friends. Then you realize they want $15/month for six months while it plays out for everyone. Um, no thanks.

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