Toying With Facebook

Hi there. This is my first blog post, and I'm aiming to write sound articles on a weekly basis and minor notes from time to time. Hope to stir some thoughts out there, and learn something as well. 

To start, has anybody seen something like this lately?

Facebook example

"Oh, that's so him/her..."

"Why did you tag me as that? :P"

"Wonder what insert name of common friend fits as?"

It took me a little while to connect the dots, but this is emergent gameplay in the making. A bunch of people in a virtual school yard inventing a game to pass the time.

Another example are all those chain-letter-notes where people answer a series of questions and tag all the people they would like to brag to, or connect with basically. Snailmail made this emerge way back when.

Let's move back to Facebook.

Many who do these tagging games are people who don't play that many games, but still enjoy being social. Maybe they would say, "I don't really play games" and "this is just a fun thing to do." I'm assuming as I don't have any statistics to back it up.

What implications does it have that people are inventing their own games on facebook? Research on it might lead to pointers on how to get people with a bias against games to try out this fun, social thing I made. (Which some would call a game)

Thoughts on this?

- Nils N. Haukås