Facebook the Board Game was recently announced. What could possibly be bad about that?
Each one of these news items, and several others, appeared in my board game news feed over the weekend. All about the Facebook Board Game and all assuring me that the game would bring an unheard of element to my board game playing: Interaction with others.
Seriously?
This is the big innovation of the Facebook Board Game, allowing me, from the depths of my man cave, to interact with other people in a face-to-face game of Facebook?
Aside from the absolutely appalling suggestion that someone would actually want to play a game based on the world's most ubiquitous social network, the network of trivial updates from people with which you have only the most tenuous connections, the network with more privacy and security concerns than any two former Soviet KGB agents during the Cold War looking for nuclear secrets, the social network that treats it's users as one giant demographic database of marketing opportunities for Eastern Bloc brides, cut rate auto insurance, and get rich quick schemes, this game fails because of two simple things.
First, it fails because, dress it up however you like, it is still, at its heart, Monopoly. Find any of those articles up there and take a gander at the images. It's Monopoly. It isn't even a particularly well disguised attempt at Monopoly. Sure, the words on the squares are different and the property owning aspect of Monopoly seems to have been discarded in favor of cutesy 'activity' spaces, but by God, that's a Monopoly game with its heart ripped out.
Which, of course, makes it the one thing in the board gaming universe that absolutely shouldn't exist: A worse version of Monopoly than the original. I know that can be hard to believe for die hard board gamers, but there it sits, a game based on Monopoly that has taken the one or two infinitesimally redeeming features of the core game and discarded them in favor of spaces that direct you to do things like break up with your significant other. They've accomplished one of the impossible tasks of the Universe, making Monopoly look good by comparison. If that isn't a seventh seal opening wide, I don't know what would be.
The second failure tries to hide from you. It gets a passing mention or two in some of the articles, but no one seems to be pointing at it and laughing yet. This game doesn't exist. It isn't even in prototype form yet. All you have is a series of rendered computer mockups of what it might look like.
Sure, there are detail views of the spaces and you can see the pawns sitting on the board, but those are nothing but semi-cleverly arranged pixels. There is no game to tout. No play testing has occurred. In fact, the only things that exist for this game are the designers outrageous claims about what this game will do and how it is intended to reform the social interactions of its players.
And yet, its designer is chasing financial support for the venture. Here, I am using designer in the loosest sense of the word. You may disagree, but I don't call anyone who slaps a new color scheme and renames a few spaces on an old design a designer. There isn't anything here that you couldn't do yourself simply by customizing the game via the perennial favorite of custom Monopoly editions, USA-opoly. Certainly there is not enough here to suggest that it needs a huge influx of investment capital to become a reality, let alone that it stands to make enough return on investment to make any backers any profit at all.
Why all the media hoopla then? What is it about this game that suggests it will revolutionize the world of board gaming or the world of social media? Why have they all lined up on the face-to-face interaction band wagon as if no other game in the history of board gaming has ever presented an opportunity for socialization with real people?
Are they, in fact, stupid?
Yes and no.
The biggest point of stupidity here is that Social Media, isn't. Isn't social, I mean. No amount of Facebook updates, Twitter Tweets, or Google circlings is going to give you social interaction. Sure, you can send out the latest information about your bagel and coffee breakfast to all your friends and get thumbs, likes, pluses and so on, but you haven't really interacted socially at all with any of the people who might be reading you. At best you have broadcast a piece of information into the ether in the hopes that someone, somewhere will notice, find value in it, and respond. In a sense, we are all our own little news station and every story is of local interest.
The fear is, that is all you are doing. Hunched over your glowing screen you await either incoming news or some bit of outgoing news. You miss out on the actual people around you and lose connections with them in favor of the more disconnected connections from Social Media.
That is the hole in the thinking that the Facebook Board Game and its maker seek to exploit. By trading on that sort of generalized fear that all 'right thinking' people have about Social Media, he has gained some traction with media outlets and been able to use that traction to promote the game and get people interested in funding it. The big problem with that is the second point of stupidity.
Either the people reporting the story or helping to propagate the press release at least, or the designer himself (possibly both) have never played a board game. I feel I can say that with some confidence because, if they ever had played board games and thought about the copy they were looking at, they'd never run with the headlines and leads they have.
Force people to interact. Ensures actual interaction. Make friends while sitting in the same room. What do people think every other board game in the world asks you to do? Is there, somewhere in these folks heads, the idea that board games are only played solo? Surely some of them must remember playing board games as children even if they don't do so now. Even the most remedial and basic board games usually need at least two people to play if not more. When did that stop counting as social interaction?
Moreover, the Facebook Board Game can't even deliver on the promises it is making. When is the last time you tried to force someone to play a board game? Or even to interact socially? I'm willing to bet that either you never have, because you have a basic understanding of how humans work and realize that you severely reduce the amount of 'fun' available when you force people to do things they may or may not want to do, or you've tried it and learned the lesson the hard way.
People hate being forced to do anything. Claiming that your board game, which is already suffering on the fun factor front, can make people interact socially and ensures that they will do so sucks what little remaining fun there is out of the idea. Especially when you have available to you non-forcing and non-demanding other games that are more fun to play from the get go than a Facebook Board Game will ever be.
In the end, what we have here is a phantasmal game with a sadly pasted on theme based around an already less than fun roll and move game which makes outrageous claims at social engineering all in the name of making a buck for someone who has no real idea what they are doing, the nature of board gaming, or how to go about it. The only real thought that went into it was a lazy one: People like Facebook, how can I make some money off that and what will get me the most attention?
So let's help the guy out a bit. If you were going to design a game based on Facebook, what would it look like and what would you be doing? What sorts of systems and mechanics would you use to do so? I'm sure one of you has a million dollar idea just waiting to be taken up and financed. Why let one guys with one bad idea get all the glory? Share your thoughts on this article and your design for a better game in the comments below.
Facebook Board Game Forces People To Actually Interact With Friends IRL
Huffington Post
Klein created the board game to "create an experience to persuade people to stop using the Internet forever," according to his site. "The idea is that instead of engaging with Facebook on your computer or phone, you can arrange to meet up with friends...
Now, Facebook board game that ensures actual interaction between friends
Zee News
Now, Facebook board game that ensures actual interaction between friends Washington: In an effort to move friends from the computer screen to the living room floor, Pat C. Klein has created a new Facebook Board Game to lure users to stop using the...
Now, Facebook Board Game that ensures 'face-to-face interaction' between friends
Newstrack India
Washington, July 20 (ANI): In an effort to move friends from the computer screen to the living room floor, Pat C. Klein has created a new Facebook Board Game to lure users to stop using the Internet forever. According to the Huffington Post, Klein said ...
Facebook board game forces people to actually interact with friends in real life
Republica
Klein created the board game to “create an experience to persuade people to stop using the Internet forever,” according to his site. “The idea is that instead of engaging with Facebook on your computer or phone, you can arrange to meet up with friends...
Facebook Board Game Makes You Get Offline
Complex.com
If you love Monopoly and consider yourself addicted to Facebook, which seems to be the case for most of us, this game was made just for you. Graphic designer Pat C. Klein has invented Facebook: The Board Game, designed to "create an experience to...
Facebook board game encourages players to stop using the internet
Polygon
A Facebook-based board game from graphic designer Pat C. Klein encourages players to get off their computers and meet with friends in real life. According to Klein's website, Facebook: The Board Game was created "to persuade people to stop using the…
Facebook board game lets you make friends while sitting in the same room
SiliconBeat
A cynic would say that Great Britain-based designer Pat C. Klein is telling the world's population that they should stop wasting time on Facebook and start wasting time playing the Facebook board game he's trying to produce. I'm no cynic. There is ...
Each one of these news items, and several others, appeared in my board game news feed over the weekend. All about the Facebook Board Game and all assuring me that the game would bring an unheard of element to my board game playing: Interaction with others.
Seriously?
This is the big innovation of the Facebook Board Game, allowing me, from the depths of my man cave, to interact with other people in a face-to-face game of Facebook?
Aside from the absolutely appalling suggestion that someone would actually want to play a game based on the world's most ubiquitous social network, the network of trivial updates from people with which you have only the most tenuous connections, the network with more privacy and security concerns than any two former Soviet KGB agents during the Cold War looking for nuclear secrets, the social network that treats it's users as one giant demographic database of marketing opportunities for Eastern Bloc brides, cut rate auto insurance, and get rich quick schemes, this game fails because of two simple things.
First, it fails because, dress it up however you like, it is still, at its heart, Monopoly. Find any of those articles up there and take a gander at the images. It's Monopoly. It isn't even a particularly well disguised attempt at Monopoly. Sure, the words on the squares are different and the property owning aspect of Monopoly seems to have been discarded in favor of cutesy 'activity' spaces, but by God, that's a Monopoly game with its heart ripped out.
Which, of course, makes it the one thing in the board gaming universe that absolutely shouldn't exist: A worse version of Monopoly than the original. I know that can be hard to believe for die hard board gamers, but there it sits, a game based on Monopoly that has taken the one or two infinitesimally redeeming features of the core game and discarded them in favor of spaces that direct you to do things like break up with your significant other. They've accomplished one of the impossible tasks of the Universe, making Monopoly look good by comparison. If that isn't a seventh seal opening wide, I don't know what would be.
The second failure tries to hide from you. It gets a passing mention or two in some of the articles, but no one seems to be pointing at it and laughing yet. This game doesn't exist. It isn't even in prototype form yet. All you have is a series of rendered computer mockups of what it might look like.
Sure, there are detail views of the spaces and you can see the pawns sitting on the board, but those are nothing but semi-cleverly arranged pixels. There is no game to tout. No play testing has occurred. In fact, the only things that exist for this game are the designers outrageous claims about what this game will do and how it is intended to reform the social interactions of its players.
And yet, its designer is chasing financial support for the venture. Here, I am using designer in the loosest sense of the word. You may disagree, but I don't call anyone who slaps a new color scheme and renames a few spaces on an old design a designer. There isn't anything here that you couldn't do yourself simply by customizing the game via the perennial favorite of custom Monopoly editions, USA-opoly. Certainly there is not enough here to suggest that it needs a huge influx of investment capital to become a reality, let alone that it stands to make enough return on investment to make any backers any profit at all.
Why all the media hoopla then? What is it about this game that suggests it will revolutionize the world of board gaming or the world of social media? Why have they all lined up on the face-to-face interaction band wagon as if no other game in the history of board gaming has ever presented an opportunity for socialization with real people?
Are they, in fact, stupid?
Yes and no.
The biggest point of stupidity here is that Social Media, isn't. Isn't social, I mean. No amount of Facebook updates, Twitter Tweets, or Google circlings is going to give you social interaction. Sure, you can send out the latest information about your bagel and coffee breakfast to all your friends and get thumbs, likes, pluses and so on, but you haven't really interacted socially at all with any of the people who might be reading you. At best you have broadcast a piece of information into the ether in the hopes that someone, somewhere will notice, find value in it, and respond. In a sense, we are all our own little news station and every story is of local interest.
The fear is, that is all you are doing. Hunched over your glowing screen you await either incoming news or some bit of outgoing news. You miss out on the actual people around you and lose connections with them in favor of the more disconnected connections from Social Media.
That is the hole in the thinking that the Facebook Board Game and its maker seek to exploit. By trading on that sort of generalized fear that all 'right thinking' people have about Social Media, he has gained some traction with media outlets and been able to use that traction to promote the game and get people interested in funding it. The big problem with that is the second point of stupidity.
Either the people reporting the story or helping to propagate the press release at least, or the designer himself (possibly both) have never played a board game. I feel I can say that with some confidence because, if they ever had played board games and thought about the copy they were looking at, they'd never run with the headlines and leads they have.
Force people to interact. Ensures actual interaction. Make friends while sitting in the same room. What do people think every other board game in the world asks you to do? Is there, somewhere in these folks heads, the idea that board games are only played solo? Surely some of them must remember playing board games as children even if they don't do so now. Even the most remedial and basic board games usually need at least two people to play if not more. When did that stop counting as social interaction?
Moreover, the Facebook Board Game can't even deliver on the promises it is making. When is the last time you tried to force someone to play a board game? Or even to interact socially? I'm willing to bet that either you never have, because you have a basic understanding of how humans work and realize that you severely reduce the amount of 'fun' available when you force people to do things they may or may not want to do, or you've tried it and learned the lesson the hard way.
People hate being forced to do anything. Claiming that your board game, which is already suffering on the fun factor front, can make people interact socially and ensures that they will do so sucks what little remaining fun there is out of the idea. Especially when you have available to you non-forcing and non-demanding other games that are more fun to play from the get go than a Facebook Board Game will ever be.
In the end, what we have here is a phantasmal game with a sadly pasted on theme based around an already less than fun roll and move game which makes outrageous claims at social engineering all in the name of making a buck for someone who has no real idea what they are doing, the nature of board gaming, or how to go about it. The only real thought that went into it was a lazy one: People like Facebook, how can I make some money off that and what will get me the most attention?
So let's help the guy out a bit. If you were going to design a game based on Facebook, what would it look like and what would you be doing? What sorts of systems and mechanics would you use to do so? I'm sure one of you has a million dollar idea just waiting to be taken up and financed. Why let one guys with one bad idea get all the glory? Share your thoughts on this article and your design for a better game in the comments below.
