Want to absolutely kill my productivity? Introduce me to a timeboxed game on pattern recognition (Bejeweled, Tetris) or bubble stacking (Bubble Island). Facebook is very dangerous for these. One of my favourite is Diamond Dash by Wooga — which happens to have a number of other games too.

A week or two ago I was playing Diamond Dash while babysitting a script run a little monster appeared on the screen saying something like “Get to level 5 on Monster World and earn a special bonus gem”. Ooooo! Bonus gem! So like a good little pawn I got to level 5 and unlocked my gem.

But now I started thinking. If these two games are integrated, what about the other ones? And so I leveled a couple more times in Monster World and soon a Raccoon showed up in the corner. Play 10 levels of Bubble Island and get a unlockable plant (Monster World is one of this silly ‘farming’ games). I’m more than happy to play 10 games of Bubble Island and so got my plant.

Is it integrated with the other games? Not yet, or at least not so far that I have discovered.

This got me thinking though that this is exactly the right strategy for creating multiple properties on a social platform like Facebook. I would go so far as to suggest that part of the product roadmap for an additional property is the integrations with the existing ones. Taking the Wooga games as the example I would likely do the following (just off the top of my head).

  • Bubble Island -> Monster Island (existing) – Play 10 games and get a plant (Bubble Bush); though the plant should be integrated into the gameplay. So far none of the ‘quests’ have required it.
  • Monster World -> Bubble Island – Plant a Bubble Bush and get 3 fireball special shots; available once a day
  • Monster World -> Diamond Dash (existing) – Get to level 5 and unlock the Plasma Gem
  • Monster World -> Diamond Dash (existing) – Plant a Heart Flower and get an extra heart; available once a day
  • Diamond Dash -> Monster World – Once you get the spellbook, collect certain amount of diamonds to add new Arabian Knights themed decorations
  • Diamond Dash -> Bubble Island – Once you get the spellbook, collect certain amount of diamonds to add new level in the Adventure mode appears

And that doesn’t even include the Happy Hospital and Magic Land games (which I think are the Monster World engine with Pets and Knights respectively) which I would likely do at the higher levels of Monster World since the quests there take a while to compete so while they are churning away you could be doing the lower level, quicker ones of a different game.

The point being that social networking works best when the network effect kicks into overdrive. That process can be given a boost by incentivizing your existing audience to try other things that they have already shown that they keep coming back to.

Oh. And I would make sure a list like this was published somewhere reputable that was highly SEO’ed. Discovering during gameplay is one thing, but making it know that you can get these things if you play just a bit more could have value too.