Sid Meier's Civiization Network will soon be entering open beta, marking the debut of the best-selling Civ franchise in the social games space. The social gaming sector has been exploding over the last year, and it's clearly been attracting more and more talent from the traditional PC and video game industry. In a recent in-depth interview, IndustryGamers asked Meier about social gaming and what makes it so exciting for players and game designers.
"When we thought about the world of Facebook and the new possibilities that that brings, it was the same sort of challenge for me: to keep all the core, cool things of Civilization, but take advantage of what this new technology offers - the idea of playing together with friends, having a variety of play schedules where people are playing a little bit, a lot, different times. How do you make that work? How do you give people opportunities to play together cooperatively? When you’re in the world with your friends, you want a different kind of gameplay experience potentially than if you’re playing against people you don’t know or if you’re playing by yourself. To allow all these different things in the world of Civilization - competitive play, cooperative play, individual play, or synchronous and asynchronous play, where you’re playing at the same time as somebody else, playing at a different time as somebody else - those are fascinating problems to me as a designer. That was the challenge of Civilization Network, to take this brand new technology, this new way of playing games, and take what’s cool about Civilization and marry the best of those together and come up with something unique," he explained.
Meier said that Facebook and social gaming is essentially the "new frontier" of games development. "It’s a place where we’re still discovering the rules, what’s going to work, what’s not going to work, what’s the audience. That’s probably what makes it very exciting for me, is to be part of exploring the frontier and trying out different things that haven’t been done before and see how they work in this new world," he said.
He added, "I think it’s that frontier aspect that does kind of remind us of the early days, when we were experimenting, when we tried out lots of new things. I think that is part of the appeal. And the development cycles aren’t as long, and kind of more designer focused in many ways and I think that…compared to the size team that’s required for a console game or a PC game, it’s a little more dynamic situation in social gaming. It makes it fun for designers in that way."
