Were or are you still an avid player of Scrabulous, the word game application that took the social network, Facebook, by storm? If so, then you were one of thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of people who were gripped by what was, in a sense, a rip-off of Scrabble.
Anyone who is on Facebook – and that will be sizeable proportion of our readership – is likely to have been notified of at least one of their friends playing the game. Heck, you’ve probably been invited to play too.
Scrabulous is among a whole host of games that are playable via Facebook and that’s not counting the numerous movie and music quizzes in which users are asked to take part on a daily basis. You can play Mario titles, engage in many retro games or have a bash at fresh offerings, all created by a wide range of people with various motives. Some want to show off their programming skills and gain the kudos of having the games played by a sizeable proportion of social networkers. Others want to test the market with a view to making some cash along the line.
But whatever the motivation for creating these apps, the fact is a new distribution method has opened up for games and it’s pulling more people into gaming than ever before. If games were ever classed as being for geeks, a combination of casual gaming, the Nintendo Wii and shared titles on Facebook is helping to cement what was once a niche hobby in the mainstream conscience.
MySpace and Facebook have both opened up their social networking platform to software developers. This means anyone with coding knowledge can create mini-applications that can be used on MySpace member profile pages. Annoying though it can be to be invited to add widget after widget on a page, there is no doubting the potential. The fact that people do add them – partly because it is easy to do, partly because it is fun – shows the willingness to offer something new to anyone looking at their profile. It’s like popping some nice furniture in your lounge.
If you could bet on this sort of stuff, you could wager a sizeable sum on people creating games for MySpace and you’d walk away with a healthy profit. A boom in the number of social network games is set to boom to fresh new levels and, with Scrabulous in mind, MySpace has stamped its authority, vowing to ban any apps which infringe copyright. Far from being a bad thing, this could lead to innovation as game makers try out fresh concepts – after all, the bragging rights in creating something new and cool is sure to be high.

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