Warbook: The Game

i discovered warbook (a facebook app) about a week ago and promptly got addicted.

it’s quite a simple game, your character (and you’re only allowed one for your facebook account) runs a kingdom that accumulates gold each hour based on the amount of land it has. You can attack other player kingdoms or join an alliance of kingdoms. You gain experience points for every successful attack or defence or spell cast. There are various character classes with different strengths. There are roughly 40,000 active players.

The most interesting thing about warbook is the social system aspects of it.

For instance, it is quite possible to cheat. A single person can create fake Facebook accounts and from there generate other warbook accounts. This gives the player a very big edge on others as some accounts can then be used to generate soldiers, others to generate gold, etc. Many of the players on the leader board are “multis”.

The opposite of such multis are Alliances. Alliances are collections of players who work cooperatively by pooling resources and different skills. I’ve just been part of an Alliance at war with a multi. Not surprisingly, the multi held its ground against this particular Alliance even though the Alliance as a collection had much greater resources and military might than the multi. The overhead of coordination of many different people and the lack of organisation was just too great. It’s a lesson that’s been learnt time and again in history - co-ordination and focus will win out.

Warbook is still new however and evolving. It takes time for Alliances to build cultural and process assets, for them to coordinate and for leaders to emerge. The next few weeks will see if the various ragtag alliances of free peoples and individual heroes can set aside their differences and take on the ever growing forces of the evil Darklords and their mindless minions (ie the Multis). Alternatively, complaints can be put to Facebook about the multiple Facebook account holders and get them shut down.

I prefer the former approach myself - divine intervention just lacks drama.

~source~