So I’m thinking about bucking the trend against social games and going the opposite direction. What would an anti-social game be like? Just tossing some ideas out, here:
- Anti-fun – It should not be a fun environment and activity like a farming (is that fun?) or a mob war (same question) but extremely unpleasant. Maybe something called SimHell, which should provide a combination of boredom and humiliation (I could think of some Internet forums…)
- Anti-notifications – instead of reminding you to play or announcing cool events you have to log back into the game to see, the game would just notify you to quit screwing around and get back to work.
- Anti-leaderboards (trailerboards?, loserboards?) – list who sucked the most at the game.
- Anti-achievements (disappointments? fails?) – announce when you really screwed up (“bubba let his crops die. He achieved the Incompetency badge!).
- Anti-invitations (rejections?) – invite people to stay away from the game. “Your friend bubba has not invited you to join him in SimHell”, or more emphatically, “Your friend bubba has requested you to stay away from him in SimHell”
An interesting take on that last one is to have invitations for enemies (“You are cordially invited to join your enemy bubba in SimHell”), but there is no enemies equivalent of Facebook (although LinkedIn is a possibility – surely there is non-trivial interesection between the set of enemies and set of past coworkers). So that’s my Web 2.0 pitch – Facebook for Foes. There is the saying that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, so that’s a Machiavellian twist to social networking (you profile page would read “you have x enemies and y friends”). Anyway, angel investors, send me a check!