Word: gaming
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Zynga's tactic of gaming Facebook's architecture was critical to its takeoff. It flooded Facebook with ads. It exploited the social network's distribution engine to pepper players' friends with updates and invitations. To release games quickly, it used a roll-up strategy, buying YoVille, licensing Texas HoldEm (which it renamed zyngapoker) and imitating rivals. Playfish's Restaurant City was around before Cafe World, and FishVille is reminiscent of Crowdstar's Happy Aquarium. Even FarmVille rips off Happy Farm, a hugely popular online game in China (richly ironic, given China's disregard for intellectual property). Once it had collected...
These offers are like ads, except that when you click on them, you're agreeing to try and then buy a company's service in exchange for game points. Sign up for a Netflix subscription, get two months free plus 100,000 points. Some players cancel as soon as they have the points. Other deals, like those that snagged Michelle, are shady. Michelle took a quiz that required her to enter her cell-phone number and a code. At some point during the exchange, there was supposed to be a notification that she was signing up for an SMS subscription...
...Social games have drawn people who would never touch a console game or World of Warcraft--stay-at-home mothers, office workers looking for a five-minute break, families. This is partly because they feel safer playing with their friends and partly because there aren't quite enough other things to do on social networks. But if they start to feel unsafe, the whole house of cards will come crashing down. Michelle is already lost. "I told her never to go to FarmVille again," says her mom. "It's a scam." Or the next killer...
...wreck or a cycle wreck?" Colorado Springs psychologist Kelly Orr, who is treating the ex-Navy SEAL, says, "We get all excited when Johnny goes marching off to war, and then we forget about him a few days later when our favorite football team loses a game." This, says Orr, adds to a returnee's well of anger and loneliness...
...honest, I've never really had any strategy at all. I don't really work that way. I know that when I see a role and it speaks to me, I'm drawn to it and I have to go that direction. But there's no master game plan...