Singapore Slings - Cultural Media Learnings of Asia Pacific for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Great Britain

Steve Blakeman

My brother Chris and I used to love Atari Pong. We got it the same time as the Olympics started in 1972 as I recall, along with our brand new 26 inch state of the art colour TV from Rediffusion. Not that we needed colour because Pong was only in black and white. But we didn't care. We'd sit there for hours, playing the game which is generally regarded as the World's first (and I would say one of the best) video arcade game hits. I loved Pong mainly because I nearly always won (not much chance my brother is going to be reading this, so I'm taking the chance to stretch the truth to make me sound more heroic).

Well we've come a long way since those pioneering gaming days, through Galaxian to Mario and Sonic to Halo. But there is a new genesis in gaming which is already growing in momentum (reference Forbes.com) and the phenomenon is Social Gaming (SG).

The humble beginnings of SG started with the likes of Zombies & Vampires on Facebook. The problem was that although they registered some initially impressive viral installations (c. 15 million according to Developer Analytics) daily usage was only around 1%.

Enter now, the next stage in the SG development... Social Games 2.0 (natch). More sophisticated, more interactivity, more stickiness and more involvement are promised with the new wave of games. Chief Executive of developers Social Gaming Network (SGN), Shervin Pishevar, commented "we're in the Pong stage of social games." SG developers, like Playfish, Slide, SGN and Rock You! are developing a whole new breed of games for the more discerning social networker. Playfish who have 4 games in their portfolio (such as Who Has the Biggest Brain? and Pet Society) already have almost 13 million installations and just under 1 million active players in the UK.

Even the big boys of gaming are beginning to realise the potential of this new gaming route (and revenue generator). Electronic Arts released 'Scrabble' on Facebook last month which already has 300,000 installations and a high proportion of active daily gamers (circa 32%).

A longer term prospect is that as the level of quality and range of these games inevitably increases coupled with the fact that more people are getting access to mobile internet through the new generation of 3G enabled phones, there is the genuine possibility that the home and portable console formats could ultimately become obsolete as people get their gaming fix through their preferred social network...