Social Games vs. Traditional Games free essay sample

Nowadays many people all over the world make daily use of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. A social networking service  is a World Wide Web platform in which you can meet your real-life friends, share information and news with them and develop social relationships of any kind. These electronic communication devices, along with the opportunity to keep oneself updated with the latest news, opinions, mundane events, etc. usually help individuals to develop and maintain human contacts overcoming the obstacles of real geographical distances. Apparently, though strangely enough, these sites hadn’t developed a series of videogames of their own for quite a long time, until the beginning of the first decade of our century. Until then, traditional videogames, that people use to play individually or, at least, in groups of real people playing together in the same room, detained the monopoly of popularity among electronic ways of entertainment. In an incredibly small amount of time videogames provided by social networking systems attracted interest from every part of the world and they seemed they could easily steal from traditional videogames their monopoly of popularity. We will write a custom essay sample on Social Games vs. Traditional Games or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Up to now, it is very difficult to say if social games are more popular than videogames or vice versa. The point is that, after a vertiginous raise that impressed and sometimes even scared traditional videogames producers, the number of social games players seems to be constantly reducing over time leaving us with the thought that that of the social games could just be a passing fad as many others in the past. In the present work, we will put our attention on the possible real users of both social and traditional videogames and we will try to find out whether they share equal popularity among people or not. Traditional Games Videogames, computer programmes for personal amusement, have a long history that remount to the second half of the 1970’s with the first arcade games for consoles, electronic devices that you could find in public places. Since then, there have been sensible improvements on almost all the aspects of the programmes such as graphics, whose aim is generally that to recreate eality as vividly as possible (although there have also been many videogames designers inventing completely different, fantasy worlds); or playability, that is to say, the opportunity for the videogame player to make a â€Å"real† experience while playing (joysticks, technical devices that are used to make virtual characters and objects move on the screen, represent a good example of it, p assing from being simple levers and knobs to sophisticated radio controlled sensors, real automobile steering wheels and gears, reproductions of airplane cloches). Nowadays, to be realised, traditional videogames may require years of production, with lots of expenditures to pay workers such as producers, designers, graphics and sound engineers, etc. , not to mention the costs deriving from promoting it on a large (usually worldwide) scale. For all these reasons, traditional videogames, with their high costs, are now suffering from smaller competitors like social games, which don’t require that amount of work behind them. Apart from that, it seems that young people, especially boys, in a range that goes from teenagers to men in their thirties, still prefer playing this kind of games rather than spending their time playing on social networks. Social Games Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ usually host social games. Social games include various kinds of games but they present some common features like the need to share the game with other friends in a multiplayer session to be played, the presence of turns by which players don’t have to be simultaneously participating in the same session of the game, the reference to some kind of social activity like meeting friends, dating and so on; the absence of winners and losers as a means to convoy the maximum number of users (usually there are missions that need to be accomplished in order to pass one level after another). Moreover, these games are quite elementary in terms of programming requiring much less effort (and production costs) to be realised. Even for these reasons, social games have encountered the critics of those who denounce its most exploitative aspects. Anyway, the fact is that the number of social games users has progressively increased over the years (almost from 2007) only to know a first stop this year, but experts think this is due to the switch of platform: more and more people are playing social games on their mobile phones instead of playing them at their computers at home. According to the statistics, the number of women (of all age) who have already joined at least one social network it’s much higher than that of the men, so we may be able to derive, as a consequence, that women could possibly be a consistent part of the social games users. Researches seem to highlight the presence of middle aged people among the users of this new kind of game. Conclusions The decline of the traditional videogames appears to be constant and ineluctable due to the differences of costs with respect to those of the social network games. Despite the market seems to be subdivided in two ranges of users (young versus middle-aged people, men versus women) this is not a sufficient reason to think that traditional videogames will successfully overcome the strong competition of social games. Furthermore, the recent evolution of mobile phones can represent a very suitable platform for social games in the immediate future.