In Perpetual Beta? On the Participatory Design of Facebook Games

This paper examines the "sociality" of social network games by shifting attention from player-to-player interaction toward the relationship between players and developers. Using a case study of Zynga's Facebook games, particularly Frontierville, and the broader "-ville" franchise including Farmville and Cityville, the authors argue that participatory design, in which players shape game development, has taken on a new and more immediate form on social networks. Drawing on the distinction between direct participatory design (consultation with selected community members) and silent participatory design (monitoring of logged player behavior), the authors contend that Facebook gaming combines both approaches in a continuous process that keeps games in a "perpetual beta" state.

The central finding is that Zynga implements player feedback, both metric data and forum comments, within days rather than the months or years typical of traditional online game developers. Examples include rapid rebalancing of in-game food items and energy and leveling changes. The authors also report that Farmville's monthly active users fell from over 80 million in 2010 to 30 million by August 2011, while Cityville dropped from 100 million to 76 million over a comparable period. This pattern led them to observe that Zynga tends to replace declining titles with new iterations roughly every year.

The authors argue that Zynga bases its design on a supply-and-demand framework shaped by player input, which can cause players to design from a consumer perspective rather than a designer perspective. This tends to produce resource inflation and overwhelming game environments. They cite Zynga's refusal to permit a trading house on the forums as evidence that developers selectively adopt feedback that does not threaten their control over scarcity, while still signaling to players that they are being heard.

The study's methodology is qualitative and case-based, relying on developer forum posts, publicly reported user figures, and prior scholarship, so its conclusions are interpretive rather than statistically generalizable. The authors close by suggesting that the social relationship between developer and player may itself motivate play beyond gameplay, though whether participatory design in these games proves sustainable remains an open question.