Twitter Games

Our Twitter channels filled with Star Defense chatter last week after we sent journalists a preview build of the game. We were pleasantly surprised by the interest their flurry of challenge tweets generated. People started inquiring about the release of Star Defense on forums and on Twitter, and traffic to the game’s website nearly tripled.

By now, we all know the power of social networks. News, memes, trends, and drunken utterances spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook. By integrating our games with these platforms, we’ve created an easy way to become a part of that conversation. We’ve added virality and social interaction to a game that is otherwise a self-contained, single player experience.

This not only adds value to the player, who can now challenge their friends and foes to high score contests at the press of a button, but it also has the potential to increase play sessions, extend a game’s natural life cycle, and even generate new sales.

When we first dreamed up the idea of linking Twitter and Facebook to our games, it was really nothing more than a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” We were planning to update WordFu and Topple 2 with asynchronous multiplayer via email exchanges - just like playing chess by mail, only substituting the neat shorthand Rhd4 for a really long URL packed with the necessary challenge data. Then someone suggested we try broadcasting challenges over Twitter and Facebook.

We had a Twitter prototype working in two days.

The Challenge
The biggest barrier to using these social networks to virtually toss gauntlets to the floor is the services’ self-imposed character limits. A typical challenge URL for WordFu, which has to convey high score, challenge time, and available letters, looks like this:

http://wordfu.ngmoco.com/challenge.php?q=Bg
EAAFyaAQAtAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEMmUPC4EoYwj5L
8wAAAAABAAAAAAAAAMK0AABCDKCeQvfWw8KYBQIAAA
AAAgAAAEK0AAAAAAAAQxYIZsLZv_JCA2eBAAAAAAMA
AADCtAAAAAAAAENNErnCUazrwqGy9gAAAAAEAAAAAA
AAAEK0AABDdOv0QmKmz8Iy86gAAAAAAgAAAEK0AAAA
AAAAQwP17cEwF2VDBdDfAAAAAAMAAADCtAAAAAAAAE
KuaQVC0p4eQon1IQAAAAADAAAAwrQAAAAAAABDjXGN
wvq-skMD724AAAAAAQAAAAAAAADCtAAAQ5AbvMIkLH
1Coh89AAAAAAIAAAAXAAAABgAAAGF3aXNlcgAAAAAA

A string of 421 characters works fine in an email because you can hide the address itself in html, but it is way too large for the wee 140-character tweets. Star Defense challenges—which only have to transmit the number of waves survived—are a bit more manageable at 92 characters. But that still leaves little room to provide context for a Tweet or Facebook status update.

Our solution: Use Tiny URL to compress the challenge strings. The Tiny URL API allows us to shorten URL’s in an application’s background, ensuring that players never have to exit the game to issue challenges.

With the URLs taken care of, it was just a matter of hooking our challenge broadcasts into the Twitter and Facebook APIs so the messages were properly delivered to their respective channels.

But getting the message to these services is only half the battle. Both Facebook and Twitter require developers to represent them in a particular way and to use specific terminology when describing their services. Following their guidelines will avoid copyright headaches down the line.

Additionally, people will be clicking these links from all manner of devices – not just iPhones. The last thing you want is to be inhospitable to a potential player who has clicked on a link from his computer. We resolved this problem by sending every user to a splash page that detects what device they’re using. If you’re on the iPhone, the page will open with links that launch the game. If you’re not on your mobile, it will send you to a Web page filled with game details.

The Impact
Right now, we haven’t collected enough data to determine how well our Twitter and Facebook challenges are resonating with players. The social networks were integrated into WordFu (on April 21) and Topple 2 (May 7) after the games had already launched. Neither has been integrated with the social networks long enough to make any grand conclusions.

With that in mind, here’s what we’ve learned so far:

• When the Topple 2 1.2 update hit the App Store, the number of session starts spiked upwards—just as they did with the release of 1.1. Not enough time has passed to determine whether the challenges will prolong this effect.


• The number of unique players has increased since the integration, but it’s difficult to discern what role the addition of Twitter and Facebook challenges played in that.


• Half of all Topple 2 challenges are sent through Facebook. Email ranks second. Twitter is used the least.


• Twitter challenges account for 75 percent of all challenge backs.  Challenge backs are when a player accepts a challenge, beats it, then posts their winning score back to the challenger.  Although it has the smallest user base, Twitter is the most active when it comes to challenge dialog.

Star Defense will be the first of our games to launch with Twitter and Facebook challenges built in from the get-go.  It will be the first true test of how social network integration might affect gamers’ play patterns.

Our hope is that it will keep people engaging with Star Defense in new, interesting ways – and really give players a cool reason to play it more over time.  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

- Elio, Allen, and Stephanie