About Texas Hold’Em Poker

I'm glad to learn about so much famous facebook applications during the seminar yesterday. Most of the applications are hot for a time and some are still in top 10 of  facebook app now. Texas HoldEm Poker is one app among them. 

It is not the first time I heard about the application yesterday. I myself have played it once for curiousty. I skiped the tutorial and played it straight away. But I found that it is not a simple game. So I went through the tutorials and picked up how to play it soon. The UI looks a bit complicated. Users need to play it for a while to get familiar with functions of each button. Though the UI looks a bit confusing, it is really awesome. It is built with flash, graphics are polished, and layout is well designed. I think this is because of the background of its company. Zynga has been a big company with so many successful apps in facebook.

From the presentation, I learned more about the game and some key points for building successful  facebook applications.

1 A simple model to develop games on facebook is to bring some classical multi-player games and combine it with the facebook's SNS property. If the game is interesting enough and the multi-player interaction is fully revealed. Then it can easily get success. It's important to use the great advantage of the facebook's SNS property. For developing facebook game, we should remember that the more competitive and interactive the game is, the more addictive it is.

2 The Cheat Issues and Gambling encouragement. As the presentation showed the cheat discourage the fair players. So this should be more effort on banning those cheaters. But this will also result losing users those who like to cheat with friends. For such a game, the chance of playing with friends is one important reason for some users to play. Without it game is really boring, because the gambling is not about the real money, I they can't get excitement or enjoyment when playing the game. This may also result people pick it up by the game and go gambling in their real life. And that is not what we want to see. So while developing a game, we should not only thinking about earning money, we must have a moral sense so that the game will not be an origin of sin.

3 Opportunities. The presentation inspired us by introducing the famous Poker game. I found that there are so much fun games have not been developed yet. I think those classical games will lead great success if the excution is excellent enough. Some similar classical games are much expected by many users. Because many classical games are already popular all over the world, so there is no need to do much advertisement. And players even don't have to learn the rule through a tutorial. With these advantages of the classical game, the opportunity for them to own a place in facebook is quite big.

My original thought: 

Bringing a classical game to the facebook platform seems a shortcut path to success. Actually there are few things to think about. First, how to add some elements to rejuvenate the old game and make it unique. This is important because other developers may also found the potential of the existing game and compete with you. The best way to keep users from leaving is to make the game by adding some creativity. Second, the social networking property and virality of facebook should be fully used to make the game fit the platform. The key of combining games with facebook is to make the game more fun by using the existing facebook's social network. We should think hard on how to spread the games effectively by using feeds and invite mechanisms.  Making  the game more competitive and interactive is the best way to make players addictive to the game. So certain features and mechanisms must be used to enhance the such characteristics. By the way, to make a difference by developing applications on facebook. We should care more about meaning of life. At least we should never make users do meaningless things or even worse.