It’s Game Time! Because Gaming is Serious Business!

A very interesting post by GigaOm posits this:

“After initial experiments with pointless apps such as vampire bites and zombies, Facebook quickly became a casual gaming mecca, thanks to the success of games such as Scrabulous, Mafia Wars and scores of other multiplayer social games. Twitter could follow the same path as well.

After all, much like Facebook, Twitter offers the virality so vital to a social network, a name space and thumbnails, a communication channel for messages and notifications, and a simple API for developers. It also has momentum. But those are the basic building blocks of a good social gaming hub — they need to be aggregated to produce engaging experiences as well.”

Speaking of Mafia Wars – they’ve been upping the ante lately by even offering a new Cuban experience outside of the normal New York Mafia action. GigaOm does have a point, SpyMaster (I admit I’m not playing this so as not to spam my FriendFeed/Twitter/Plurk connected Facebook stream already) is a proof-of-concept of how viral Twitter can be if you used it as a casual gaming hub. Which begs the question and is actually the last sentence of the GigaOm article:

“Of course, all of this means nothing without good games that can hold people’s attention.”

So, I’ll leave it up to you DLS-CSB GDD students to come up with a Twitter casual game on your own free time to make the case for Twitter being a casual game hub, okay?

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo (you can add me on Twitter/Plurk as well!)