Volley Game Play; It’s Big.

When I first was introduced to Words with Friends something clicked. I guess a lot of people had that experience as the game is hugely successful. The thing is, I really don’t enjoy Scrabble that much. I pretty quickly realized what it was I liked about the game, it was the back-and-forth, play at your own pace, game style. I immediately started calling that “Volley” game play. At first I had a tough time explaining it to people and they didn’t really believe that it had much to do with the games success, but I’m pretty sure it does. When it comes to mobile, people often just have a little bit of time to “catch-up” on stuff. That’s why feed/browse apps works so well (ala Facebook and Twitter) on mobile. Of course, many people do like to dig into games on mobile because that’s what you do when you play Plants vs. Zombies and other successful games. But I think there are a lot more people that just like to check-in, do a few things, and then check-out. Volley games give you that ability. It also allows you to play with multiple people at the same time, so maybe you have 5 games going on, volleying back and forth. And, on top of all that, you play with friends so there is another level of satisfaction to beating and taunting your FB buddies.

Incidentally, a quick Trademark search found that Zynga successfully secured the “With Friends” trademark for any game property. See a screenshot of that here or search on TESS here. It seems rather ridiculous that they could get that, but I guess you can get anything with enough money these days.

When you add the well known and fun for lots of people game-play of Scrabble, you’ve got pretty much a guaranteed winner. And that’s what Words with Friends is. I have been talking about this for several months now, and sure enough, Zynga releases another similar game just a few days ago called Hanging With Friends; it’s basically hangman between friends. I actually like this one much better because even though hangman isn’t all that great in itself, the game play is more fun and it has one slightly different element, a sort of Double-Play then Pass style. Essentially you need to take your turn and guess a word, then you have to create a word for your opponent, then you pass. So I find it more fun. Regardless, it has the Volley style again.

It’s not just me and Zynga though (yes, I’m giving myself a lot of credit for something that probably more people than I even know knew about before me), Apple sees the value too. The upcoming version 5 of the iPhone OS is going to add this play mechanic to game center which will certainly drive more developers to integrate the method into their games.

So I’m working on another iPhone app now with a few guys. We’re using that method, and we’re borrowing some concepts from a classic board game (thanks Zynga for the lead). But we’re bringing in something a bit new. We’re leveraging the social data layer as a game play mechanic. This is another concept I’ve been dreaming about for some time now, and I haven’t seen much done there. I’m working up another post specifically on this topic which I’ll put up Monday probably. I’ll explain the concept and theory more there, and I’ll give a bit more color on the game we’re working on.