Facebook: The Advergames are Coming… and they are bad.

On the heels of Parking Wars (a game developed to publicize A&E’s new Parking War reality series), comes four new games from H&R Block. Their Facebook page complete with said games is here.

Developing games for Facebook isn’t as easy as it looks. The myth: people are so into Facebook and its games that they’ll play any game. The reality: bad games are still bad games, particularly when those games are bad single player games that either a) don’t take advantage of the network or b) take advantage of the network, but in uncomfortable ways.

A couple things to note before I explore the games:

1. Player propagation of these games is achieved through newsfeed advertising (pictured above)
2. These games are playable on the H&R Block page . The Deductor may be placed on the player’s page
3. The page offers real-world rewards (5 fans a week will receive a free tax return)

For businesses, the challenge in offering games to bolster your IP or to attract a new market to your IP is that a bad game can actually make your IP look less than flattering. Unfortunately for H&R Block, that’s how I was left feeling after playing these games. They felt rushed, haphazard, a bad match for the potential market and… well… like a hustle. When companies throw games at players hoping to hit that “young professional” marketshare, bad games actually have the potential to become insulting. “Did they really think we’d like that?” “I hate when companies do shit like this.” I hear it all the time from the hundreds of college kids around me. Worse, they also have a similar effect on the many 30+ and 40+ game-hungry individuals on Facebook.

The Deductor

I played The Deductor two times, and I have no desire to play again. You seriously need to, though, to appreciate what I’m saying here. I really do mean that, too. This game is that bad.

The controls are abysmal; the worst I’ve seen on a Facebook game. If you blow the controls of a game, it doesn’t matter how good anything else is. But nothing else is good. All they had to do was take Jetman and reskin it, or any of the other games that follow the old Helicopter dynamic. Maybe it’s more artful to reinvent the wheel wrong.

The Financial Match Quiz

The idea: take a popular Facebook app paradigm, apply your IP and presto, no? No. Though 60% of this game’s audience accesses this game daily, that audience equals 34 people.

While this game is perfectly in keeping with the IP, it’s a bad call. Finances are the number one source of strife in marriages. They’re things we tend to keep from our friends. Many people are in debt. Some feel ashamed about the state of their finances. College students (the bulk of the Facebook market) are notoriously indifferent to finances. All of that aside… seriously, you want to take a financial quiz and match the results? Why! Why would a player ever want to do this?

Sometimes, I discuss things like “lead’s blindness.” It’s when you are so into your idea that you can’t see the obvious flaw. In this case, when someone said, “Do you think people will play it?”, someone should have said, “Dude, no.”

The Block of Fortune

This app is entertaining, but not in the way it wants to be. For the record, I did not make this screen shot or answer up. As a bonus, it’s also buggy. Once you ask it a question, if you highlight the text in the text box and delete it, you cannot input text correctly again until you click in the main box or perform some other clickage.

Tax Fact or Myth

A common trait of game designers is our curiosity to learn about everything we possibly can. We get deeply involved in a particular topic, research it diligently and move on. Just recently, I’ve researched Irish history in Boston in the 1870’s, Aristotle, Brenda Laurel’s take on Aristotle, Michael Mateas’ take on Aristotle… and well, you can see where this is going. While you might not call those topics riveting, they are to me. This is not:

It’s rare to find a topic that bores a game designer. I love MS Excel, math and economic balancing. I’m cool with that. However, taxes are even less interesting to me than rubricks. I pay other people to do my taxes for precisely that reason.

The Big Picture

In a nutshell: H&R Block’s new games don’t feel like they were developed by a game developer, and they also don’t feel like they were tested by a game player. Parking Wars, by contrast, offers quirky and compelling fun that keeps people coming back. It’s fun to ticket your friends. It may have been fun to audit them, too.

IP looking to enter the Facebook platform would do well to consult with game developers.

Words on a Page

A statement by the developer of these games: “360i is an independent metrics-driven agency that serves as strategic digital advisors to large brand marketers. Recent recognition includes being named one of AdAge’s Hottest Independent Digital Agencies Around and OMMA Magazine’s Search Agency of the Year.”

I am sure this means something important to someone, but not to the audience of these games.

While I’ve been harsh in this analysis, the games deserve it. At the same time, 360i made the right call in getting H&R Block onto Facebook. I just wish for these games and the advergames to follow that they’d worked with a game developer (and there are many working in this space).