Like others, I have found the recent “social” game explosion to be rudimentary and lacking. When I log into Mafia Wars or 140Blood I do not see a game, I see a vending machine. Push a series of buttons and a tasty treat comes out. You are hanging out with your friends so why not have something sweet on the side, maybe you can coax a friend to have one too.

Don’t get me wrong, these type of social games are games (there are goals, actions, rules) and they can be seen as more of a critique on MMORPG gameplay as much as the Flash game “This is the Only Level” is for redundant level design.

However, I don’t see what is so social about Mafia Wars. I see my friends, I can place them in my mafia family and the game says they “help” me complete jobs, but this is all asynchronous gameplay; I am never actually helping my friends or playing with them. There’s a big difference here compared to other “social” games like Scrabble online which allow players to play each other right then and there.

The difference between these two types of social games is actually the age old division between communities and society (nature vs. modernity or tribal vs. systematic). This fight weighs the benefits/drawbacks of a small, local, egalitarian community verses the large, systematic, democratic society.

Many writers and theorists have written on the subject: which organizational structure is the natural human state, what properties of each should be cultivated, which is considered good or bad, etc.

Ferdinand Toennies is one sociologist that I believe does a wonderful job of separating the two distinctions in his published work “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft” (meaning “community and society”) back in 1887.

Community

Toennies emphasizes the fact that humans in a community relate to one another based on their blood, neighborhood or common habits. Communities are often family oriented, in the same general location and everyone is friendly with each other, participating in common rituals and have similar likes/dislikes. In a community, members adjust to each other, understand and organize together, provide common support and promote ownership amongst all.

Society

A society is the artificial construction of community, according to Toennies, where individuality takes over and “everybody is by himself and isolated, and there exists a condition of tension against all others.” Everyone must rely on artificial means of currency and exchange in a society because there is no sense of shared worth, like in a community. Individuals are separated from the process of exchange and force (legal and governmental bodies) must be created in order to manage human interactions.

Not Social, Community and Society

There is a striking resemblance between the two types of social games I mentioned and Toennies’ distinction between communities and societies. Mafia Wars is defiantly an example of a “society game,” as players are isolated from one another and are always at ends with other players, trying to get more power or money. Scrabble online, on the other hand, is a “community game” where players have a chance to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.

I think this distinction is key in understanding where social gaming is going. It seems like the only community games that exist are re-hashed old boardgames that are digitally transformed. While the society games look more like the vending machine games, trying to get into everyone’s pocket book while appearing to connect the player to all their friends.

My worry is that these trends will continue unperturbed. We will not progress past the boardgame motif for community games and micro-transaction gameplay will plague the society games for years to come.

Perhaps some combination of the two may be reached and these two types of games do not need to stay separated. It is essentialist to think that only the properties of either communities or societies show up in a specific human organization, while in almost all cases a mixture of properties appear. The problem is that games are abstractions and have the ability to be essentialist, casting out the properties of one organizational structure or the other, and focusing on only a subset of properties.

My plea is thus not for Mafia War or 140Blood to disappear but for game developers to continue to push for community games too, besides the typical boardgames, and attempt to mix the two game styles together. There is a lot that can be done with Mafia Wars such as offering more real-time gameplay when friends are online, richer strategy/skill-based elements in the game, and communication between rival players other than just “attack me.”

We must foster what it means to actually be a part of a community online because we often get lost in the properties that make it more like a society.

A rare non-game post.

I have a problem. I was on vacation for two weeks and spent very little time catching up on blogs and my other news feeds. As you can imagine I have a lot of information to sift through.

Now the problem is not so much finding relevant information. I use Bloglines and I can search through my feeds for specific information. I also have personally made feeds that snag any story that has certain keywords.

My problem is that as I sift through each individual feed I reread the same information over and over. Yes I know Twitter was DoS attacked last week and thus do not need to read about it in every single tech blog feed.

Therefore, this problem is not one of searching for relevant content but one of automatically grouping similar content together; whether I find it relevant or not is … well … irrelevant. I want a RSS reader that will group similar stories together into one group automatically. If I find the group interesting then I can sift through the multiple copies of the story, if not then I can toss the entire group (delete them from their respective feeds) making my individual RSS feeds that much clearer to peruse.

I put out a tweet today trying to find a service or reader that has this feature but only received information on services that “sorta” have the feature (Like Fever or Google Reader). So, striking out on my own, I have been trying to find any RSS reader that comes close to the “grouping” feature I am looking for.

Here is what I came up with. (In short I didn’t find anything but learned a lot about the types of RSS readers)

Blending, Mixing, Combining, Mashup

Those words all mean the same thing apparently (they are just as bad as interactive or engagement). Take two RSS feeds, add a dash of a keyword or two, and you get a healthy snack of a single RSS feed which takes two feeds and turns them into one. The benefit to this style of blending is that you can manage, search, filter just one feed instead of tens or hundreds. This is fine but the only way to group the items in the feed is by a human going in and filtering the feed; either by searching for a keyword in real time or by setting keywords to search before hand.

Not what I was looking for but here are some posts about blending RSS feeds which talk about services like Blogsieve.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is basically a do it yourself RSS feed creator. You blend feeds, filter them, run content analysis on them, all using Pipes’ wysiwyg graphical editor. At first glance Pipes seems like it could be the answer.

Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem as the blending option, nothing is done automatically. Users must enter specifically which feeds they wish to group and have to modify the Pipe if they ever want to add more. Plus, Pipes’ “TermExtractor” module, the one used in the creation process to search for keywords, does not seem robust enough. The description says it finds the few important keywords in a feed item but what about URL links, pictures or embeded videos.

The other downfalls of Yahoo Pipes is that 1) it is not a reader itself and 2) in general, it is for the Techie crowd and is intimidating for someone to jump into and start creating feeds.

My search continues.

Digg-Style Readers

Next I found a couple of downloadable products that do not help with the sorting of feed items in general but instead sort items based on personal taste. Perseptio works similar to Digg, allowing users to state whether they like or dislike items they find in their feeds. Perseptio will then rate future stories based on that like/dislike information. It is a standalone desktop app and is free to download. I’ve installed it but I probably will not use it because I’m not really looking for stories I like, just a way to group similar stories I may like together.

Fever is another similar product but looks a hell of a lot nicer. It rates stories based on your personal rankings and by how popular a certain item is; so again, kinda like Digg. However, Fever costs $30 and must be installed on your own server space. It defiantly looks like a nice product and if you are in the market for what it is offering than I would defiantly check it out. Me, I’m still looking.

AIR Apps

Quickly, I next came across a recent post about RSS Feeders made with Adobe AIR. Scoop and Espressoreader looked interesting as they can sync with Google Reader but again didn’t seem to have what I was looking for.

Social Readers

Finally, I come to Social RSS readers. These are basically sites that link users together who each have a set of RSS feeds and allow users to share information from those feeds with each other. Technically, you could call Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg Social Readers too. But I did find one site called Streamy that I signed up for (you can check out a short video demo here).

Streamy doesn’t seem to have the grouping feature that I am looking for but I think it is on the right track. For my phantom grouping feature to work it would have to rely both on algorithmic methods of combining RSS feed items together in addition to utilizing the knowledge of my social circle. Meaning a grouping reader would need both a way to analyze the content as well as analyze the collaborative information of my friends or other users. Streamy looks like it is combining these two avenues, though is a little heavy on the collaborative/sharing side. And do I really need another “social” website that I need to maintain? I’m still going to check it out though, maybe I will switch from Bloglines.

So in the end, no I did not find a reader that grouped similar feed items together. I believe I know a thing or two about web parsing, the “semantic web” and recommendation systems but maybe it is a harder problem then it seems. I’m going to give Streamy a try but right now Bloglines is still working out for me.

Hopefully the grouping feature is just hidden somewhere out there and I have not found it. I just want that one feature but no one is giving it to me.