Weekend Reading: Social Gaming Without Friends

I am one of the latecomers to Facebook, one of the people that was reluctant to sign up for the service fearing that it would take up too much of my time, that I would need to talk to too many people I barely know and that I would be overwhelmed by the information offered by friends.

I finally signed up in order to play Dragon Age: Legends, the companion piece to Dragon Age II that was created by BioWare and by EA 2D studio and since then I have also played some King's Bounty: Legions, quite a bit of CivWorld and some The Sims Social.

And I tried to experience them all without or with minimal social connections, which basically translates to not spamming friends news streams with invites and object requests and to limited use of their characters when that's allowed.

So far The Sims Social seems to be the Facebook game that most requires friend cooperation with most of the game mechanics, from object creation to home building and crafting, linked to using other people to get items and to help your development through interaction.

CivWorld is also a very social game experience but it's not as intrusive.

One cannot make much progress as an independent nation but the mechanics created by the developers at Firaxis make it simple to join with other players and collaborate with them without actually interacting with them too much on a human level, something I entirely approve.

As always those who are more social and interact more might create a better civilization but being social is not actually a requirement for progress.

Dragon Age: Legends and King's Bounty are maybe the less social focused on the Facebook games I have tried in the long term.

In Legends one can easily get through the adventures using just the stock developer made characters and it's fairly easy to become resource independent in the long term.

In Legions the only social action is entering into Players vs. Players battles with other gamers, leaving the single player free of any friendly interactions.