Social Games all the rage? Not so much

There’s a great article over at Search Engine Watch about how “Social Networks don’t Automatically Make Games Social.”  Despite all the recent hype over social gaming, most of the games we see on Facebook are really single-player games that have loose social ties, like high score lists among your friends.  Most of the “social” features are really just pyramid schemes (I’m looking at you, Farmville), like giving away in-game bonuses for inviting friends, but the game mechanics don’t involve real social interactions, and there usually isn’t even a chat room.

True social gaming on Facebook is still pretty rare, and with the complexity of building truly social games, we’ll probably have to wait a while still before they come to the fore.

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