Mr.Farmville

A couple years ago, games like Friends For Sale sold millions of Facebook users on the idea of buying and selling friends.  The fad eventually died down, but new interpretations of the concept continue to pop up.

Empire Avenue is the latest, a social site dreamt up by a group of former BioWare, Electronic Arts and MySQL employees. The founding group is enough to convince us to take notice, but today the company also disclosed a $200,000 investment from a group of angel investors, led by Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures.

So what, besides the all-star cast, makes Empire Avenue stand out from the classic friend trading concept? Most notably, it’s that the people being bought and sold aren’t on just one social network. They come from all of them.

Okay, so the game doesn’t connect with MySpace or other small networks (yet), but using connections to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, Empire Avenue tags players with an initial value then drops them into a virtual stock market to become stocks. It’s an interesting enhancement the original games of yesteryear, and actually pretty fun if you get some friends to play with you. That said, as with Friends For Sale, it does feel like a game that may wear thin once players start asking “what’s the point?”

Essentially, players sign up for Empire Avenue and give themselves a unique “ticker” name (like the six letter abbreviations at the stock exchange). When they start out, their stock is not worth much. However, the means of increasing that value is very natural.

The game doesn’t actually require players to do anything on the site to increase their worth. Once logged in, the iser can connect to the three aforementioned social networks, and any action performed on them will increase how the player’s worth. This includes commenting, status updates, tweets, and so on. Furthermore, any privacy settings set on, say, Facebook, will translate over to Empire Avenue as well.

This is where the core of the game comes into play. Players increase their value so that when investors buy shares, the palyer earns more money (Eaves). These Eaves are then used to purchase shares of other players, turn around, and sell them when their value grows. As in the real stock market, it’s an investment, so it can be prudent to buy stock when it’s low.

In fact, in less then five minutes after account activation, we were bought, showing there are already people searching for new, cheap, players, before they start tweeting up the internet. In addition to buying and selling, there’s also the more strategic means of directly trading stock, but most of the community updates and player statuses are seeking to buy.

Though the basics of the game are simple enough, there is a great deal of strategy to be had. Users are given charts and graphs that show fluctuations in players’ values during the past 30 days, daily gainers, weekly earners, and various communities. It’s a lot to take in, honestly, and it looks a bit too much like a real stock site, which has the obvious tendency to turn off a lot of potential users. It just doesn’t look fun.

As far as other social elements are concerned, there are a few more beyond the already noted. One of them is a community dashboard that allows people to connect with other individuals based on city, interests, or personal, private communities. These are not much more than discussion threads, but each one is part of the leaderboard system in Empire Avenue, creating a sort of team oriented competition where the overall community value is measured.

Of course, leaderboards seem to be the only driving factor behind playing Empire Avenue. The problem is that not all players care about these. As it stands, players buy and sell stocks, while raising their own value, in order to make more money, which is then used to repeat the same process. There’s no real tangible reward (save for a few achievements that pop up every now and again). Even the in-game shop where people can spend their Eaves on something other than stock consists mostly of means to purchase more stock.

As a side note, however, players can purchase Google Ads-style advertisements for themselves to place on other users’ pages. In fact, it works very similar to the Google counterpart, with a cost per page view. That’s an interesting mechanic, but how players will use it remains to be seen.

Overall, Empire Avenue is a pretty cool idea, and earns bonus design points for rewarding players for doing what they already do anyway. Unfortunately, that reward all goes toward a single, repetitive point, which is to make money, in order to make more money, in order to… you get the idea. There’s no tangible reward other than trying to top the leaderboards. In addition to that, the site feels a little bit too much like a stock site. Despite the fact that it’s the theme of the game, it may be a bit frightening to most, and likely drive them away before they try anything. Sadly, most people do, in fact, judge a book by its cover.

Source: Inside Social Games