Virality » DarrellHardy.com

A Tale of Two Viralities

Tadg Kelly recently talked about “The Two Viralities” on his site. He pointed out that true virality, evangelism, comes from players loving a game enough to talk about. The other, a “false virality,” is just obligation — if you want to play the game, you have to drag your friends into it too.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been on the receiving end of both types of virality in social games.

For about a week straight, my Twitter feed was hopping with people singing the praises of Panda Poet. They called it clever, fiendish, and addictive. (When did “addictive” turn into a virtue?) They didn’t need to do this. Panda Poet lets you invite your friends to play, but doesn’t require you to do so in order to progress. So when a link to the game floated across my desk, I took a risk and hit it, if only to see what the buzz was about. (Turns out the Twitter-folks knew what they were talking about. This game is good.)

Meanwhile, in Facebook land, the all-seeing ticker next to my page started telling me that my social-gaming friends were being pulled into a new game. I cringed, just a little bit, because I knew what was coming. Sure enough, I started getting invites from those friends for that game. Not because it was a great game that they thought I would like to play, but because they’d hit the limit of how much they could play without be forced to go viral.

I think there’s a couple lessons here: one obvious and one not-so obvious.

The Lesson Which is Obvious: Obligatory virality wears out its welcome. Back in the day, I’d click any invitation to any Facebook game. “Cool! My old high school buddy wants me to join his mafia! I like mafias! I vaguely remember this guy! Let’s play!” Today? I gaze suspiciously upon all such invites, and am not above asking the sender, “Is this game any good?”

The Not So Obvious Lesson: Good games that don’t require virality should still make it easy for a fan to go viral. I like Panda Poet. I want to spread it to my friends. (I’m doing so now.) But there’s no Facebook connect button, no Google+ “+1″ button, no easy way for me to shout to my various social networks, “Hey, this is a cool game!” Yes, you can invite friends via e-mail (and I have) but without the ability to broadcast your evangelism, the message might get lost.

Are there other lessons? Probably. And I’d love to have you share them with us below.

Virulent Stories

I’ve been thinking again about player stories in video games. No, not the soaring epics crafted by the masters at Bioware and Valve, but the funky little stories that players tell about their own, specific experiences while playing games. As I’ve said before, these stories have value; these stories help sell games — but only if enough people learn the stories. And the key to that is (as much as I hate to use the word) virality.

Minecraft got a huge surge of popularity right out of the gate from YouTube videos. Ditto for Just Cause 2. StarCraft 2 has filled vast swathes of YouTube (and Korean TV stations) with game replays.

Anything on YouTube can easily go viral. How easy is it for players of your game to get their stories online there?

Free Realms was the first MMO I know of that made it a matter of one or two clicks to record your play session and post it on YouTube. Why don’t all the MMOs do this? If I have a good story, I want to easily share it with my friends. And if they can easily share it with their friends… well, the odds of someone new coming to check out your game go up quite a bit.

I’ve seen some attempts at using social media like this, but they are crude, pitiful things. When I see a Facebook post saying “Joe Samplename just got the Eat All the Kittens Achievement in KittenNomNom 3!” I’m less curious about Joe’s game than I am amused thinking that Joe called in sick and just got busted by PSN. The same goes for cheesy tweets proclaiming your levels or achievements to the world.

These aren’t player stories. This is just spam.

What I’d like to see is something like in The Sims. In that game, the system automatically takes screenshots during dramatic moments (births, deaths, weddings, more deaths, the other deaths, okay this isn’t funny anymore where’s the pool ladder? deaths) and lets you label them like pics in a photo album. (“Photo Albums,” children, are how the Old Ones used to store images. It’s like Flickr, but in a hard-bound book.)

Again, not all video games are about player stories, and that’s fine. But for those that are, I’d encourage the developers to consider how the players will record and pass along those stories. Stories sell games. The best stories go viral, and can sell lots of games. Let’s make it easier for that to happen.