Recently I heard of a new social game called Spymaster. Well, not so much heard of, as much as suffered from. The game is currently in beta right now, and is something that has been cooked up for Twitter. I can understand social games on Facebook. They make sense, because they’re separate and they don’t interfere (too much) with other people’s home pages. If someone’s updates are annoying you, you can hide the updates from that particular application, to keep your stream from being cluttered.
Spymaster, on the other hand, seems to manage its notifications by posting everything a player does to their Twitter stream. Yes, everything. The problem with that is that on Twitter, you either follow someone or you don’t. There’s no way to hide particular Tweets. So, if you start putting out a lot of spam you give people two choices, put up with it or un-follow you. I’m leaning towards the latter. It’s hard enough to sort through all of the Tweets I get already, without having to scan through crap like “I just did damage to @XXXXX in an attempted assassination attempt!”
Twitter is all about providing useful information to your friends, either in the form of status updates, witty sayings, links, images, video… well you get the picture. In other words, no one is following you on Twitter to read your spam messages from a social game. I mean, who really cares? Other than yourself of course?
I don’t see Twitter games that spam people’s streams becoming overly popular, but if they do, I hope to God that people are smart enough to create a separate account for it. One last thing I’d like to say is, isn’t Twitter already suffering under the current load? Is it really smart to try to build a social game that sends a lot of Tweets when the platform is already regularly overloaded?
Spoilsport. ;-)Actually what you're most likely currently seeing is not everything that can conceivably come out from Spymaster. There are 8 specific notifications available in the game. By default, 3 are chosen when one first joins. The reason people may choose to spam more is because for each notification you turn on, you get more money from actions you take in the game. Not really all that much more to risk alienating all of your followers but since the game is so new you figure it'll take people a little while to figure that out. Plus the boost may be more valuable to the noobs so expect notifications to be turned off the further along someone gets into the game. Personally I've whittled it down to one so you'll be seeing it a lot less from me at least.And yes, since it's a social game, other people (namely those playing the game) will find some (definitely not all) of the notifications of importance so you can't say it's purely narcissistic.You may also find this post of interest on this subject: http://is.gd/KqH7
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