Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
Promotions/Press
Facebook the Board Game?
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Fiddleback" data-source="post: 7652190" data-attributes="member: 6704070"><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">Facebook the Board Game was recently announced. What could possibly be bad about that?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span>[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]<span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">Seriously?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">Are they, in fact, stupid?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">Yes and no.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: 'verdana'">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.</span></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Fiddleback, post: 7652190, member: 6704070"] [FONT=verdana]Facebook the Board Game was recently announced. What could possibly be bad about that? [/FONT][PRBREAK][/PRBREAK][FONT=verdana] 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.[/FONT] [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
Promotions/Press
Facebook the Board Game?
Top