pikkle blog

Preparing for the Game Developer’s Conference next week, where I’ll be giving a talk on social games in japan.
More to come, but meantime here is a Pikkle overview!

2010年2月4日より、株式会社ミクシィがサービスしているSNS『mixi』において、モバイルゲームアプリ『ポケット☆水族館』のサービスを提供しています。

『ポケット☆水族館』は自分だけのオリジナル水族館を作る育成シミュレーションゲームで、たくさんのおさかなや、豊富なアイテムで個性豊かな水槽を作り上げていくことができます。

サービスを開始してから、すでに数万人のお客様に楽しんでいただいております。

また、『ポケット☆水族館』 はPikkle開発チームのノウハウを生かし、企画からリリースまで約1ヶ月間という短期間でこぎ着けることができました。

今後も主にソーシャル要素を中心に、さらなる昨日の充実を図りますので、ぜひ、一度『ポケット☆水族館』をお試しいただければ幸いです。

Since japanese phones are rather unique, i posted a screencast of our JooJoo service. It’s all in japanese but there’s a spoken explanation (in case you don’t have your speakers on!)

This is a full-flash mobile social game service and works on the mobile phone in japan exactly as you see it here.

problems viewing? heres a link to the quicktime file

Enjoy!

I’ve been studying up a lot on achievements and in-game trophies recently. XBL pioneered this area, but it hasn’t been adequately applied to social games IMHO.
Good post here from Matt Thompson on what Left4Dead can offer design wise for the social web.

Ola, my facebook account has been blocked. In case you can’t read the image (trying to login from japan) it says “we decided to block your account. click here for more info”.

With so many people signing up each day, the false positives are basically collateral damage.

Before this happened I didn’t realize how important controlling your identity was. Facebook is aiming to be some type of identity provider with FB connect. OpenID and other federated standards at least allow you to control your identity independently, and authorize its use.

UPDATE: Facebook has become a relying party for openID. This is a big deal! Most openID supporters want to use openID to propagate their own proprietary login credentials. But a relying party means its a two-way street - you can use another site’s login to be the lynchpin for your facebook identity. This really does show how much faith FB has in openness.

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=246

OpenSocial seems to the ultimate “equalizer” in social platforms. But this piece is more about the endless battle between content and distribution, which is fought on every single media that comes along.

i spent a bunch of time back in the early 00s with a master of media, mr Robert Tercek. “aggregator is a dirty word” and “nobody wants to be portalized” are key lessons from Rob…
Parallelizing this media knowledge of the endless fight between content and distribution, he was also the first person i talked to who identified the container vs. provider tension that is current in today’s social app world.

What’s unique about the battle this time is that APIs can provide a common platform across many channels. At a superficial level this is like NTSC being glue between ABC and CBS. But in fact its more like running the same program on both networks,but the content-provider is the only one with access to the end-audience. In the grappling match the question is always, who has the bigger audience? If you can aggregate the networks, you win.. at some point the negotiation seesaw flips.

So given that OpenSocial levels the playing field and reduces service differentiation, which containers would adopt it? Generally, one would assume the underdog. “Less people will build apps for me alone, so I’ll adopt a standard and get more apps”. Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to be the case: market leaders (Bebo in europe, Mixi in Japan, Xiaonei in china, MySpace in the US) are all going opsoc.

My belief is that “social APIs” will migrate and be the *fabric* for internet experiences from now on. The coming of the “logged in internet”. EComm sites, news sites, blog portals - all stand to gain a lot from exposing social APIs.

In an OpenSocial world where the same APIs allow content to have wider distribution than any single silo, the power balance may shift back to the content provider.

楽しかった！９人ぐらいなので、ちょうど良かった、深い情報交換が出来ました。

参加者：
Gumiの国光さん
gu3のケータイopensocialプラットフォームと日本発のfriendsforsaleゲームの説明いただきました。

面白法人カヤックの 吾郷さん、小俣さん
opensocial simple の説明といろいろ面白いサービス

リグレト/dividualの山本さんとドミニクさん
リグレト参加してください！

和田さんと小林さん
元サイバーエージェントの和田さんからopensocialの広告ビジネスの可能性のディスカッション

PikkleのDC　（隠している！）
私が海外opsocゲームを元に議論出しました

来月もやる予定ですので、参加したいなら、コメントください！
次回はもっと大きい所探しています。

海外のコミックでは、吹き出しの形と基準は日本と違います。私が当然と思った形は日本で伝えきれない場合もありました。逆に、日本の怒りマーク（なんという、この×みたいなやつ？）は海外で使ってない。
参考リンク

via boingboing

Most first gen-social games still seem to depend mainly on content pushed from the servers out. Here I’m going to look at a few examples of games that work the user-generated content into the game system.

“Famous”

In the game “Famous”, you can add your own fashion items. They’re checked before going public. Somehow, they charge you for the privilege of creating items, which seems in reverse from what you would want - this will de-motivate users to upload items.

Interestingly you can create both tasks and items; I guess they basically opened up their internal tools, allowing other users to create content just as the game’s authors were doing…

Pictograph has a whole editor built in that allows you to upload images and then draw on top of them. Super-cool. The items you create have a deeper meaning than the images - they are little word-puzzles. You can then challenge your friends to solve your puzzle, so the graphic material you uploaded becomes an intelligent game script to tease your friends with.

It’s a shame this mechanic doesn’t work in japanese!

Shufflebrain’s PhotoGrab allows you to turn any photo into a game by placing “hotspots” for your friends to find. It re-uses your existing facebook photo-albums.

their tools all have really nice clear tutorials to walk you through what to do.

What other games are out there that include user-media inside the game system?

いよいよ日本でopensocialサービスが始まりそうです！

そして、opensocial勉強会を開催したいです！

日時：2月6日（金曜日）
19時00分～
場所：Pikkle株式会社　新宿オフィス
〒160-0023
東京都新宿区西新宿8-14-18
シミズビル 4F
TEL 03-3360-2007

地図：http://pikkle.com/company/location?lang=ja
参加費：無料

アジェンダ（※仮）

• 海外のソーシャルコンテンツやゲームのレビュー（DC）
• OpenSocial海外／国内のAPIやcontainerの状況
• バイラル機能の使い方
• １世代、次世代のopensocialアプリの特性や可能性
• アプリのレビュー
• ※追加したいことがあれば、是非コメントに追加してください。

１個の好きなアプリをピックアップして、他のメンバーと説明して頂ければ、交流がうまくできると思いますので、好きなアプリを事前に考えてください！
参加したい人をコメントして、もしくは私宛にメールください。dc |at| pikkle.com