Social gaming has some 250 million+ players on Facebook alone, its top companies have valuations in the billions, it attracts heavy investment from major corporations like EA, Disney, and Google, but here’s something social gaming doesn’t really have: Its own Wikipedia entry. As of this writing, Wikipedia’s Social Games entry is a placeholder, while the “Social casual games” entry is less than 100 words long, and even more shocking, comes with an editor’s note, “This article may not meet [Wikipedia's] general notability guideline.” Seriously! By contrast, even though they’re niche genres relative to social gaming, Wikipedia’s MMORPG entry is almost 4000 words, while the entry on first-person shooters is over 3000. So what’s the deal? I put the question to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, for his take:
“I don’t agree with your premise at all,” Wales told me. “You’re not looking in the right places, I think. The entry on FarmVille alone is pages long.” Indeed, Wales is right that many of the top social games have individual Wikipedia entries, but it still seems strange to me that such a gigantic genre hasn’t yet gotten its own general entry. What are the biggest social gaming titles? Who are the major innovators? How much money are they making? Wikipedia has no one-stop place for burning questions like these.
So what’s going on? Several speculations: Social gaming as a broad topic doesn’t yet generate the kind of geek-heavy passion that fuels Wikipedia, so it’s not surprising that no one in the encyclopedia’s dedicated editorial community has taken the time to write one up. What’s more, though it’s three years since we started seeing early titles like Zombies launch on Facebook, we still don’t entirely agree on what a social game is. Does it have to be embedded on Facebook or another major social network, or can it include mobile games with their own network? How about console games which have Facebook integration? And so on. Whatever the reason, social games as a category still seem to be in a nebulous state.
Whenever I attend a social gaming cocktail party, the topic, “When will we get more respect?” inevitably comes up. My half-joking answer now is, “When we get our own Wikipedia entry.” Fortunately, he hinted unsubtly, all it takes is just one social game fan with a verified Wikipedia account to start one.
