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it may be helpful to think about virtual goods not just in merchandising terms, but also in terms of premium content. People have always paid for content like movies or concerts because of the emotional experience they get from watching or listening, even though they don’t end up with anything physical to take home at the end of the day. In this sense, social games are like a much more interactive form of entertainment media that also happens to allow for a wide variety of inexpensive a-la-carte premium content purchases that enhance the experience.

Inside Facebook ponders the relation between virtual goods and the service (business) model. I agree that virtual goods can provide an emotional focus point, yet they do not have narrative aspects in a similar fashion, and therefore I do not see that the movie/concert comparison is totally accurate. Especially in their functional and decorative aspects virtual goods are, in the end, objects that afford collecting and use, which makes them different from a scheduled entertainment consumption experience such as movie-going.

Firstly, to judge Farmville through the lens of a ‘hard core’, card-carrying ‘Gamer’ or even to analyse it from the standpoint of a frequent casual gamer is a profound mistake as PC, console or even downloadable games are very different animals and intended to deliver a quite different experience to an often much narrower (and smaller!) clientele.

Kevin Corti identifies a number of success factors in the design of FarmVille. It is interesting to see how newcomers in the farming genre that are more ruthless in their design, e.g. in terms of negative feedback, such as Happy Habitat, are able to retain players.

Scott Jon Siegel has posted his slides from the recent Montreal International Gaming Summit. Excellent presentation that is essential reading for any of us working with social games. I find his approach echoes my own work on the social game design framework.

Social games to date are mostly just fancy interfaces with very little back end depth. It does not matter in Restaurant City what combination of items and menus you use in your restaurant. It doesn’t really matter what farm orientation you have in Farm Town. Most of the side quests in any RPG have no variation. Most of these games cast aside compound effects and deep design and so they are very easy for any developer to interpret into a rule set and then clone.

Tadhg Kelly's post in Inside Social games is a thorough look at the practice of cloning going on in social games business. Striking depth and accessibility in the same concept is the big game design challenge.

If you have a good app attached to a well thought out external web site that authenticates using FB Connect, then this week’s changes probably HELPED your business.

Scott Rafer presents an analysis of Facebook's priorities in terms of the announced platform changes last week. This gets me thinking about the need to (re)consider FB Connect as an important aspect in designing social game concepts.

If you are a designer and you start on a free to pay project and you start with those old assumptions, you will fail -- no matter how good a designer you were in the old days," warns Ye.

Worlds in Motion reports on the Virtual Goods Summit talk by Zhan Ye, the President of Chinese developer GameVision. It's a tresaure trove of an article for us who try to understand and conceptualise how game design is transforming in the contexts of social networks.

virality is compounded growth: with a high user base, the forbidden practices were useful to getting higher absolute number of new users into those apps. If these new rules are enforced, the bigger apps’ growth will likely slow down and leave room for smaller players

game quality matters: with less spam it will take better quality games to succeed. This should also benefit Playfish.

originality matters: it will be a bit harder to copy a new original game and grow it rapidly. However, the big players have the marketing spend to boost any new game they want

players will be more in charge: with less spam, new players are likely to react more positively to friend’s inviting them to games

discoverability improves: the games dashboard should help also new apps surface

the playing field is more even – if just for a while: everybody needs to find the new best practices

Everyplay's Jussi Laakkonen writes in detail about the consequences of the platform changes for developers. He also sees a number of positive aspects in the change, especially for new, smaller developers. Well worth reading.

we also expect the changes to be painful for the ecosystem as a whole. Apps that lose their virality will also see drops in revenue, at least until they figure out the new features, and the offer, payment, and analytics companies that have risen to work with them will at least also be temporarily hurt as result.

Inside Social games documents the upcoming Facebook platform changes with useful screenshot examples.

In the spirit of being as open and transparent as possible, we are publishing parts of our roadmap for Facebook Platform. For the first time in this level of detail, we will provide a roadmap to help you anticipate future changes and opportunities. Like all roadmaps, it may shift slightly, but we will share insight into what is happening as these details are available.

Yesterday's Facebook Developer Garage introduced the upcoming changes and here they are, in one place. New design constraints, new chances for creative design solutions.

Facebook is reshuffling  all the traditional channels like notifications and requests that developers use to reach new users and tucking them away in harder-to-reach parts of the Web site. The idea is to give users more control over the information they see on their homepage. Before, if a person signed up for a new game or reached a new level, the app would send out an update to all their friends’ news feeds right on their homepages. The problem was that the activity stream could get overwhelmed with updates that may not have been all that relevant to other people.

For someone writing a book about designing social games, such changes are game-changing...yet, it puts more emphasis on my goal of generalizing certain principles, as well as drill down in to the details of, e.g., socila games UI design in application embedded within a platform such as Facebook. Tracking and documenting the platform changes in terms of design allows to make observations about their effect, and thus predict the severity of forthcoming changes. Moreover, social game designers and devs need to stay on their toes to be able to react to such changes, and re-invent their viral mechanics on a constant basis. Perhaps this allows new players to emerge, if the big ones fail to adapt.