Bossa Studios: Anti-Social Gaming

"[Our games] should look and feel like nothing else on Facebook... We want people to look at the screen and not believe that it is running on Facebook even if we tell them. That's a buzz, and that gets word-of-mouth... If I'm having a great experience with a game that looks this good and is co-op in real-time, I will poke my friends on Facebook. It doesn't matter whether they're hardcore or not."

The 'fanboy', Bithell argues, is Bossa's secret weapon for attracting new players. The way the company approaches design and the way the team regard themselves has more in common with the indie scene than social development, where hits are generally excellent products that spread via enthusiastic word-of-mouth. Stigma or no stigma, the "rabid desire for information and to talk about opinions" that Bithell believes defines fanboy culture will respond to quality, regardless of

"It's exciting. They want to be the person to tell their friends about the cool new game," he says. "We need to place ourselves in a position where they can play our game and tell their friends about it in a way that doesn't feel fake or false. Virality should be about empowering players to talk about the game they are playing in the way they want to. It shouldn't be about tricking them or forcing them into doing something."

"We're working really hard top use these amazing tools, because there are so many things in Facebook that, if used right, make it better than Xbox Live."

We're working really hard top use these amazing tools, because there are so many things in Facebook that, if used right, make it better than Xbox Live

Mike Bithell, lead designer

However, while Bossa feels a kinship with widely admired indie studios like Mojang and Team Meat, neither Olifiers or Bithell believe for a second that the feeling is reciprocated. The general antipathy of indie developers towards social games is well documented, most famously in Ian Bogost's satirical game Cow Clicker, and Braid developer Jon Blow's outburst in April last year in which he branded the entire form as "evil".

This is the general impression of independent PC and console developers' attitude towards social games: happy to highlight and criticise/mock their problems, but markedly less engaged with finding answers. It isn't hypocrisy, exactly, but it places an arbitrary division in what is, essentially, the same community of people. As more companies like Bossa emerge the situation will improve, but Bithell and Olifiers refer to "the stigma" of social development as something present, an obstacle to overcome in the here and now.

And while Monstermind is a good idea and a well-crafted product, it served a dual purpose: it was developed in tandem with virtually every aspect of Bossa's operations. Web servers, hosting platforms, databases, analytics, it's all custom built on team, and it's all now in place. From now on, Olifiers believes that the company can assemble functioning prototypes of entire game concepts in just a few weeks.

"I think [Jon Blow] is reacting as a player," Bithell says. "The reason I joined Bossa is I looked at social games and I thought, 'These are rubbish.' And it looks like Jon and I had a different approach to that; he decided to say publicly how much he hated them and I decided to try and do something about it."

"I think Jon Blow could make an awesome social game if he wanted to. The medium isn't evil; the medium is incredibly powerful. A lot of the games that have been made for it have not served players in the right way, but I don't think there's anything in writing off an entire way of playing games."

"Minecraft is the best social game ever made. The fact that Minecraft 1.0 runs in a window by default; I don't know if Notch did that on purpose, but it's the perfect game to have open while you're sat on Facebook. The fact that he obfuscates the crafting mechanic, so that the only way to play Minecraft is with the Minecraft wiki open in another window."

"He made a game - and I really want to believe that he did it entirely on purpose - that you literally couldn't progress with without engaging with a community online. You can't play Minecraft in isolation. Anyone who has played Minecraft for more than 5 minutes has had to ask someone for help. That makes it a social game - it's excellent. And that's why we need those people to come into social games and do interesting things."