In truth, my money had NOT bought me any kind of different experience – merely stuff. I love stuff, don’t get me wrong, but my significant investment in the game wasn’t allowing me to level up any faster. There was no added interactivity or further engagement to be had. As far as I’ve been able to tell as a player, when Pet Society gets a new feature it is released to everyone regardless of level.

Since the time that I began playing, in the spring of 2009, Playfish has added a hand-holding first-five-minutes experience that the game originally lacked. Pet Society actually forced all players to go through the new FFM experience when it launched. As a player I was annoyed that I had to tick their boxes (and rip up one of my precious fruit trees to plant a flower!) but as a developer/researcher I was actually interested to see the new experience. Essentially you just navigate around the various menus and perform a few tasks. Icons glow, messages pop up, etc. I smell a questing system!

This belies the promise of Pet Society. It took me a long time to figure out what was fun for me in Pet Society. I didn’t enjoy the minigames you play with your pet which are part very simple watch-and-click games/part Nintendogs grooming. I discovered that the fastest way to level up was to visit my friends who were playing the game and feed them one piece of food. This became very monotonous. So, my fun was shopping; really, the collection of stuff.

Eventually I became so bored that I stopped playing. I can’t help but think how much more fun the game would be if they wed the collecting-stuff behavior to a light questing system. I’d have some reason to stay in the game and continue spending money. But perhaps questing is a subscription model behavior. Pet Society did already get me for $80 after all.

Expected Use:
We thought that players would convene on their favorite websites and memes to talk about the content. We see game events huddled around I Can Haz Cheezburger?, BoingBoing, and Twitter. What we’re not seeing is groups of people showing up to these chat rooms looking for each other. Or if they are looking for each other, they join, see that no one else is around, and leave.

We had chat rooms enabled on IRC long before chat on URLs was available. We ran a room just called #pmog on irc.freenode.net. At any time, between 15 and 30 players and GameLayers, Inc. employees would be in that room. In addition to the Forums, #pmog helped the core of our community grow and develop PMOG-based activities like The Tubenauts podcast and PRisk.

Actual Use:
Rather than players consistently returning to the URL-based rooms that the chat enables, they’ve been creating rooms based on Classes and their community roles. They’ve also created meme-based rooms that function apart from any website. You can’t keep a good meme down, I guess. #ikillforbacon and #destroyers are two of the rooms that meme and game-based on irc.thenethernet.com. Each player who joins clicks on Chat is automatically logged into #thenethernet.com.

Most interestingly, we haven’t seen a big increase in the number of players using chat. Essentially the same players who met us on irc.freenode.net are with us on our own IRC server. So despite the one-click chat on every URL we haven’t actually made our chat function more accessible.

Takeaway:
Incentivize the frack out of it! Our junior developer/game designer, Alex Friedman, keeps a sticky note on his desk that says: “If you want players to do something, make it a game event.” We haven’t yet done anything to reward players who use the chat function. Additionally, The Nethernet does not yet have any kind of “group” feature. I would imagine that if players got datapoints for chatting using our client and if we had some sort of groups or guilds system, chat would be used a lot more.

Really cool to see how stuff like this plays out!