Exploring Playful Experiences in Social Network Games

This study examines the playful experiences that players report while engaging with social network games, using the PLEX (Playful Experiences) framework as its analytical lens. Drawing on 330 coded experiences from 110 university-student informants playing 23 Facebook social games, the authors aim to address a gap in qualitative research on social games, an area that has received comparatively little systematic attention. Their central claim is that the PLEX framework offers a useful structure for understanding how players experience these games.

The most prominent findings concern Competition, Completion, and Challenge, which emerged as the three most frequently reported experiences and together accounted for 39 percent of instances. Eight categories collectively covered 68 percent of all reported instances, indicating a relatively concentrated experiential profile. Competitive experiences proved more common than collaborative ones such as Fellowship and Nurture, a pattern the authors view as significant for how social games are designed and understood. The prominence of Challenge also runs counter to earlier scholarship that characterized social games as lacking meaningful challenge.

Genre differences were clear and consequential. Casual puzzle games were associated with Competition, Challenge, Suffering, and Relaxation; casual simulation games with Completion, Nurture, Discovery, and Exploration; and mid-core strategy games with Control, Completion, and Competition. The study also documents outlier experiences, including enjoyment of violence (Cruelty), shadow learning, and Submission produced by ranking features. The authors acknowledge limitations in generalizability, given the university-student sample and the specific set of Facebook titles examined.