Suvudu Free Book Library has a bunch of free downloads books from Del Rey — really great ones. Nice to see another free library out there. 🙂 And hey, Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb, Kim Stanley Robinson — hurry, go grab ’em!
Back in July of 2008, I pointed out YoVille, a Facebook MMO that runs as an app. Back then, it had 150,000 daily uniques.
Today, I’m here to tell you that YoVille is almost certainly more popular than WoW in North America.
The Top 25 Facebook Games for March 2009 and The Top 25 MySpace Games for March 2009 are a pair of posts over at the Inside Social Games blog. And what do they say? That YoVille has 2.26m users on MySpace and 4.46m on Facebook. And yes, these are monthly uniques.
Now, there is probably some overlap between the stats on the two services. And there is little doubt that WoW makes a lot more money, and is a lot more game.
But we should not be quick to discount this. More game and better art can be added. YoVille is a virtual world: it has avatars, money, inventory and housing. It has embedded games. It has a map. It has chat and persistence. And it’s in Flash. Oh, and they picked up 1m users in the last month.
Amid all the hoopla over whether there is room to go around WoW, here’s an answer.
Every once in a while, I get asked about doing an updated version of Theory of Fun. I generally reply that not only do I not have time, but that there’s fairly little that seems to merit updating. Plenty has moved on the political front, but science moves more slowly, and so most of the stuff that the book references as its underpinnings hasn’t seen any radical changes.
Then again, the book doesn’t dive all that deeply into some of it. I think the only reference to dopamine happens in the end notes, even though it’s central to the statement that fun doesn’t equal flow. (Arguably, the better update would be to surface that stuff more in the book…)
Well, the science does move some, and iHobo has a pair of great summary articles on Why You Play Games and The Biology of Compulsion which sum up quite a lot of the recent research on all this. Not only is it a handy reference, but there’s also a pointer towards the forthcoming book Beyond Game Design: Nine Steps Towards Creating Better Videogames, with articles by Bateman, Lazzaro, Bartle, Isbister, and others. My pre-order is in!
