Twitter Games... Some Big Opps Ahead

Twitter is on my mind in a way that you wouldn’t expect Twitter to be on one’s mind. What I’m thinking about are Twitter games. As an open forum of sorts for celebrities and the average Joes of the world to post whatever they want to everyone on the planet, it should come as no surprise that games are slowly creeping onto the service. The problem is, to make a game work, you must be sure to stay within the parameters of the particular platform. In the case of Twitter, you’re saying goodbye to sound, visuals, and nearly every other characteristic that makes the modern game what it is today. Well, all but one: the community. One of the greatest assets a game can have is its followers and players that interact with each other. Would Call of Duty still be relevant without its multiplayer component? It’s hard to say, but for a better example just look at World of Warcraft or the more recent success of the free Runes of Magic, which recently reached one million users. The difference between these online game communities and Twitter’s community is that one group showed up to play the game whereas the other is there simply to keep tabs on friends, celebrities, and anyone else they may have some interest in. However, with that being said, one can draw parallels between Twitter and Facebook, which didn’t initially offer games but eventually opened the floodgates for free apps to earn a presence on nearly everyone’s page, whether gamers in the traditional sense or not. Though Twitter is a service that only offers basic status updates like a mini-blog of sort, you can bet that various games will become more prevalent in the near future. The best example of a Twitter game so far is Sony Pictures attempt to hype up the upcoming Terminator Salvation which encourages players to “join the resistance” by following their account Resistance2018 in which various trivia questions and anagrams will be put up for them to answer and earn points to be contending with others on the leaderboard. This is a great start for building up a new gaming platform that is Twitter, but what I want is more. To completely take advantage of creating a great game on Twitter, take the community features to the next level. Leaderboards are ok, but why not do more? One post from someone should affect someone in some significant way that will retain their interest. What I want is a game that gives the user as much of an incentive to reply to some enthralling event as it does for them to reply to Ashton Kutcher’s tweet stating when he’s going to sleep. By now you may be asking “how?” How do you achieve something like this on a platform that’s so limited? The Game Agency is focusing on this question because the answer could inevitably be very rewarding for the right marketer or those simply looking to create a sub-community within the large Twitter population. When you take the time to stand back and look at tools at your disposal, you’ll find that the limitations fade away and possibility is all that remains.

– Jason Polansky