I have been pondering the total reliance on Twitter and Facebook and realize that not all social media networks are to last forever. Take a look at MySpace and how its audience base has changed in the past few years.
The point of my thesis is to allow for the interactive story to have input from friends, family or colleagues from any social network. By keeping with the link method I can ensure that the story nodes are transferable to the different social media networks thus increasing the audience base and collaboration for the stories.
What about tracking? How would that work? Each of the links would have a queries associated with them to identify where it was posted on what social network.
Isn’t that spammy? Won’t people just ignore those pleas? Yes and no. One would have to take a look at the type of people who like playing those type of games versus those who just don’t want to even see it. Many of these games have received a bad rap over the past years because the trend has turned them into grind task type games such as “You need to do X before you can do Y but you need # before you can proceed further… ask your friends for help or pay money to continue.” These games are built for monetizing reasons with no end in site. End the game then the money slowly trickles to a halt. Where’s the fun in playing a game that doesn’t end? What fun is it if you have to keep on doing a task over and over just to do something else? Keeping a player engaged can be hard and its that fine point that needs to be addressed to keep them interested. Allowing the user to ask outside opinions for alternatives for what path they should take adds the chaos factor into the equation thus making the adventure different each time. Sure, sometimes grind tasks may be added but it is from my recent survey that those should be done sparingly to avoid aggravating the social media audience of the user.
For this prototype I am using Facebook and Twitter as the two social networks as my focus but I will also allow the users to post to alternative social networks like Tumblr.
The goals that I am intending on meeting are:
1. Increase outside influence on a group’s choice within an interactive story by allowing the group to post these choices to their various social networks.
2. Offer alternative methods to obtaining supplies or distance traveled such as utilizing geolocation that uses mileage or places to unlock elements instead of posting links for help on the social networks.
3. Do not require people who click the links to install the application. Allow them to peruse the site without interrupting their flow; if they choose to join they can choose to just follow a groups adventure or join in on the fun.