Firstly, I want to discuss a part I liked about the lady that played Words with Friends
while waiting to pick her kids up from school. It started off as just playing a word in the
five minutes her kids needed to pack their things to her having so many games that she
couldn’t finish by the time her kids were ready and ended up thinking about what word she wanted to play instead of listening to how her kids’ days went. I feel that I have the same problem with games like Words with Friends. I find that I have to allocate time for it
instead of just being able to play here and there like you would a solo game like Candy Crush. When I play a networked game like Words with Friends I feel like I need to do the best possible instead of just the first move that pops into my head. I can play a Candy Crush level over and over again but the exact Words with Friends game will only be there once. When I played the game I often found myself sitting at my desk for an hour with a word unscrambler open in another tab just so that I wouldn’t miss any high point words. I couldn’t bring myself to play anywhere else because I wouldn’t have access to my “cheating” method of playing and so I wouldn’t want to put down a bad move. The fact that it wasn’t something I could play in a few minutes while waiting for something is what led me to stop playing it. That and the fact that many of my friends also lost interest in the game for whatever reason, and playing with strangers that it matches you up with isn’t as fun as beating someone you know in real life.
Another thing that was brought up that I really related to was game servers being shut down and the games being gone forever. I experienced this with a game that I love called U.B. Funkeys. It was basically Skylanders before Skylanders were cool. The game was discontinued in 2010 for reasons still unknown, and the community around it has since dissipated. Luckily, there is still a local version of the game that can be played but the online server was taken down so players could no longer interact with each other. There was so much backlash that the company ended up putting the servers back up for a while (they may even still be up, I haven’t checked in a while). It just baffles me how a game with such a strong community could be shut down like that. Especially when they had the potential to be such a successful game. This game was literally just like Skylanders, Disney Infiniti, and that LEGO game. You had little figures that you would put on a hub and they would show up on your screen. The only difference was that U.B. Funkeys was solely for PC while Skylanders and the others were for all of the gaming consoles. I’m telling you this game could have made it big. I even made money from ad revenue running a blog about this game. It was really great and I wish the game still existed. 🙁 (I could make another example out of Big Fat Awesome House Party but that didn’t have nearly as big a following as this game. I miss that game too.)