Yesterday Games.com reported that
Civilization, one of the pillars of the real-time strategy videogame genre, will be
launching a version of its long-running franchise on Facebook in the upcoming year.
As I mentioned to fellow classmate
katdiogo in a comment on a recent post about
Farmville on Facebook, there are very few games available on Facebook that appeal to me. Though I clearly enjoy playing videogames, as someone with regular access to other gaming platforms, Facebook does not tend to draw me in.
However, the news of
Civilization coming to everyone's favorite social-networking site, for me, could be a (no pun intended, honest) game-changer. When I grew up, the bread and butter of my videogame experience was half
Doom, half
Warcraft and
Command and Conquer style RTS (real-time strategy) games -- until I was about 8 years-old and started playing online games.
Civilization is a game which defines the RTS genre for many people. Much like something in
Farmville, the game is based on progression (rather than say, Pacman or Tetris -- you are generally building off of where you left from. The idea is to take a group of people (normally sorted by nationality) from their start as simple gatherer-hunters, up to their pinnacle as world-dominating superpowers.
I initially heard about this game via Twitter, when all the gaming sites I follow suddenly went crazy as they broadcasted the news. Then, I had gaming friends who similarly tweeted and retweeted the information. I know I just made the point about buzz driving games on social-networking sites, but this is a prime example of what I meant. Already, without having to do anything other than pump their story into the right channels, many people in the target audience (people who have enjoyed past
Civ games and would be likely to try out the Facebook version) have this news on their radar.
It remains to be seen if the game would have any more power to retain a player-base than the usual Facebook game-application fare, but given
Civilization's (well-earned, in my opinion) good reputation amongst avid gamers and even an older audience (the first
Civilization game was published in 1991), I have high hopes already.
I initially heard about this game via Twitter, when all the gaming sites I follow suddenly went crazy as they broadcasted the news. Then, I had gaming friends who similarly tweeted and retweeted the information. I know I just made the point about buzz driving games on social-networking sites, but this is a prime example of what I meant. Already, without having to do anything other than pump their story into the right channels, many people in the target audience (people who have enjoyed past Civ games and would be likely to try out the Facebook version) have this news on their radar.