The early days of gaming on Twitter

Twitter's large community of interconnected users makes its a natural medium for live gaming. The only downside is its limited canvas: You can only do so much with a text-only interface. Still, with enough imagination, you can get a decent Twitter advergame off the ground. @EAHasbro has been experimenting in recent weeks with Twitter versions of Battleship (the first person to @reply with the four correct coordinates of an EA admin's battleship won a coupon for the game) and Connect Four (the first person to "connect" four friends to @EAHasbro via a combination of a hashtag and @replies won a coupon), etc. Trivia contests are an obvious choice, too. Or you can go whole hog with a complicated Twitter game like the one currently being hosted by the upcoming movie Terminator Salvation. Users can join the "Resistance" by following @resistance2018 and earn points by replying to short text-based challenges like word scrambles, trivia questions and Hangman-style word puzzles. You can also upload Terminator-themed Twitter wallpaper, get extra points for spreading the game through retweets, and so on. The challenges couldn't be more low-tech, but games don't always have to be flashy to be popular. Look at every game ever created for the beloved Commodore 64.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

May 13, 2009 in News and Analysis | Permalink