Playfish: Social game developers 'must act responsibly'

Segestrale, whose company PlayFish has produced four of the top ten games on Facebook, spoke about how social games are able to reach non-gamers by bringing games to where they socialise rather than making them have to seek them out.

"Traditional games are great at generating emotions such as joy, achievement, frustration and suspense through progress in storytelling and puzzle design," he said.

"But those are only a subset of emotions we go through as people. Nintendo's genius was to notice that these emotions are important but perhaps not everything - or, rather, that the player-game connection isn't as important as the player-player connection.

"What's telling about Nintendo's marketing strategy is that, unlike Microsoft and Sony, it doesn't focus on games - it focuses on the people playing them. They're selling experiences with friends rather than games - they're selling different emotions, such as friendship, envy, anger, love and pride."

This is something that social games, being based on existing social networks, can capitalise on, by taking real-life friends and making them a core part of the gameplay. Drawing on PlayFish's experience, Segestrale revealed that over 95 per cent of distribution of its games was viral, from people either seeing what their friends are playing or being invited by friends.

It was here that Segestrale warned the audience that there is a real danger of people being turned away from social gaming because of spam, and that social game developers have a responsibility for the potential of the medium to be realised - pointing towards the increased restrictions Facebook has placed on applications as its SDK has matured.

"The video games crash of the 1980s was because of bad product quality leaving people disillusioned - and there is a risk of alienating customers from social gaming. The most successful applications at the beginning of Facebook were inventive about having to invite friends to get access or to earn in-game bonuses.

"Facebook curbed the practice, but there will always be a sense of integrity that we have to have in order to make content that people geniunely value and not just spam - which is useless anyway, as those users won't be serious because they're there under false pretenses."

The overall message was one of opportunity, however. "There are genuine new opportunities for new games and gameplay using these platforms - we haven't touched the surface of what's possible. We need to inspire the public that games aren't what people do at home, in the dark, on their own."