An important announcement for Social Girl! The Facebook developers are upgrading their API (application program interface) on April 30, 2015. This version may affect the game. The preschooler is an adorable and tumultuous creature. Kids of this age are just beginning to understand concepts like respect, sharing, listening, and curiosity. The thing to remember when initiating social skills games and social play among children of this.
If you’ve ever accidentally sent an embarrassing text to the wrong person, you know the horrible, sinking feeling that settles in your chest when you realize that your ill-considered words or provocative photos have gone astray — and there’s no taking them back.That sense of horror is the animating force behind, BuzzFeed’s new “awkward party game.” The concept is simple: players receive cards that tell them where to share a message or video (your Facebook New Feed, your mom, your ex) and what to share (the picture in your camera roll, a text that says “I love the smell of my own farts”). All you have to do is pick your poison from the available options, and hit send.It’s a game that feels halfway between Cards Against Humanity and Truth or Dare, a modern twist on the prank call that is designed to “implode your beautifully curated digital life.” It’s also a great way to promote online harassment, a phenomenon that needs absolutely no encouragement.While many of the options are silly or innocuous, others veer uncomfortably toward the sexual. Options listed in the promotional materials for the game include numerous messages one might not want to receive from, say, an ex: “Wanna be the +1 for my cuddle party,” “I’ll be your puppy if you tell me I’m a good dog,” “Send me a photo of your pretty ears,” and of course, “eggplant emoji?”A representative of BuzzFeed told The Verge that the cards were vetted and that their intent is to embarrass players, not their recipients. The written rules encourage participants to “play with common sense. The idea of the game is for players to make themselves look and sound silly, not to humiliate anybody—especially the friends and family of the players. Think before you post.”It’s a nice sentiment, though a difficult one to take seriously in the context of a game where the entire premise is forcing other people to view provocative and potentially creepy messages without their consent.
If you design a system that promotes, enables, or fails to curtail abusive behavior, then abusive behavior will followThere’s a meaningful distinction between a or a misdirected sext and deliberately sending messages designed to provoke shock, especially ones that orbit the subject of sex. Like Truth or Dare, Social Sabotage creates a social space where it feels acceptable to do things we would ordinarily be too ashamed or insecure to do, like kiss a friend or reveal a secret. Unlike Truth or Dare, it recruits unwitting or unwilling participants to take part.There’s a certain thrill in violating taboos and operating outside of normal social boundaries, and games like this give us permission to cross those boundaries without guilt. We’re not to blame, after all; the game made us do it.
If you’re looking for a reason to act inappropriately or offensively, Social Sabotage offers a ready-made excuse for anyone offended by your unwanted eggplant emoji. It’s all just a game, just a joke. It’s a convenient fig leaf for harassers and bullies of all stripes to hide behind, one that is only interested in the enjoyment and consent of exactly one person.The critical failure of Social Sabotage stems from the same failure that plagues so many tech companies and their harassment-riddled products. It fails to sufficiently address the questions that every designer, engineer, or creator should ask about their work: what is the worst thing someone could do with this, and how can I prevent it? If the answers are “something really bad” and “I can’t,” respectively, then maybe — just maybe — the world is better off without it.“Think before you post” is a strong rule for any online interaction, but it does little to counteract the fundamental purpose of the game: violating comfort zones not just of the player but anyone the game touches, whether they like it or not. Encouraging people to do this with embarrassing and sometimes sexual content in online spaces that are already rife with abuse is an idea that should sound bad to everyone in the year 2017, and particularly to anyone who claims to be savvy about social media.Of course, Social Sabotage doesn’t force people to harass — being a creepy jerk is always a choice — but as virtually every social media platform has demonstrated with excruciating clarity, if you design a system that promotes, enables, or fails to curtail abusive behavior, then abusive behavior will follow. And when it does, the people who created that system will bear responsibility for it — their intentions be damned.
Is turning out to be quite popular with the girls. The social gaming company proved that again this week with the launch of, a new game for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.Since the game launched seven days ago, it has reached the No. 6 ranking for top-grossing apps in the App Store, moving ahead of Angry Birds. The game is part of a strategic expansion that Burlingame, Calif.-based CrowdStar calls Project Trident, where it wants to succeed in the mobile, social and Asian gaming markets.
CrowdStar says it now gets about 50 percent of its revenue from mobile games. It is doing so by focusing on the under-served market of girls and women, said Peter Relan, chief executive of CrowdStar, in an interview.“Owning an audience on mobile is not so easy,” Relan said. “But we’re seeing it is powerful to focus on young women and girls.”CrowdStar has lost a lot of ground on Facebook with its social games. The company was once No. 2 on Facebook and has dropped out of the top 15 now. But Relan said the shift to mobile has helped the company.
CrowdStar has about 150 employees, with about half of them working on mobile games. The mobile titles are coming out faster than the Facebook games.
But CrowdStar is still working on a hardcore post-apocalyptic game called Wasteland.“We are not focused on large numbers of Facebook users anymore,” Relan said. “We are focused on our audience, which we can serve really well with higher average revenues per user.”Previous games in the “Girl” series include It Girl and Top Girl. Top Girl saw similar success when it launched on mobile earlier this year, and It Girl has been a hit on Facebook. Social Girl challenges players to become the most popular girl in town by making virtual friends, going on dates and progressing in their relationships with boyfriends. Players advance their characters by befriending different cliques, unlocking new kinds of clothing and buying the best outfits.