Social Artifacts: The Powerful Building Blocks Of Social Gaming
I’ve been using the term “social artifact” for awhile now and it is probably time to publicly debate it a bit, as I think it is an important concept in social gaming. Please leave comments here on this blog or on Twitter if you’re interested in exploring the topic. Here’s the thesis -
Social networks have always revolved around the expression and sharing of personal information. In the early days of Ryze and Friendster, personal expression occurred through simple text comments and perhaps a profile photo or two. Myspace brought us an explosion of Flash-based widgets and other look-at-me vanity bling. Facebook dialed back the broadcast-oriented vanity content (bye Flash widgets) in favor of streamlining and personalizing distribution (hello feed) of passively generated metadata (hello social artifacts).
In the majority of cases along this evolutionary track, people were actively creating content and posting it to be consumed by as wide an audience as possible. This was true both on and off social networks - 1:many broadcast. The content on our Myspace pages was intentionally placed there by us in much the same way we actively created Flickr pictures, blog posts, Amazon comments, and YouTube videos. Facebook introduced a radically new dynamic with its feed and stream feature sets. This system is purposefully designed to custom wrap and distribute information abstracted from our online activity. This activity metadata is not intentionally created. It is a passive by-product of our Facebook activity - an artifact if you will. Perhaps just as importantly, these social artifacts are only delivered to what an algorithm perceives to be our closest friends. In one stroke Facebook not only applied massive leverage to the volume of “content” that its users were creating but also smart-targeted its distribution to only those who who might actually care. Microcasting for micro-content.
This finely targeted info-mist is made up of social artifacts and it is typically these bits that we interact with when we play games on social networks and not our friends directly. The vast majority of successful games on Facebook are asynchronous. Our friends are not present when we play these games and, with a small handful of notable exceptions that involve direct head to head play, the game designs are not reliant on specific friends’ availability or even active participation in order to progress. Instead, friends and metadata extracted from their activity are converted into content in your game as you are in theirs.
This leveraging of social artifacts as game objects turns 100% of players into game content creators. 
That is a gargantuan increase over the 0.1 - 1% rate most game and Web properties have historically seen. While it is arguably problematic to equate unintentional metadata with intentionally crafted content with vastly higher production fidelity, my sense is that the use case doesn’t care. In fact, the emotional impact of lo-fi games that incorporate social artifacts can rival that of much higher fidelity productions. Social emotions can be a potent active ingredient if activated correctly. The irony of course is that something so inherently interpersonal can be activated in such a lonely fashion with no synchronous play or direct 1:1 interaction. It feels a bit like calling to get the answering machine except, in this case, our service called and left the message…for everyone it thought would like to hear it. This solo play in social clothing dynamic has been much lamented in the MMO space.
Still, philosophical debates on solo vs. group play aside, I welcome your feedback on the social artifact concept. Please comment here on this blog or on Twitter with the hashtag #socialartifact.
-Shanti
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