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?
Bradley Farless 