Review: Spymaster
Sunday, May 31st, 2009As a developer who works with various APIs, I am always compelled to try new products that utilize the Twitter API. I am not a person you would consider to be a gamer. I never play games, online or otherwise, which makes my involvement in Spymaster a rare exception to the rule.
I received an invite from a colleague and proceeded to sign up and invite other Twitter followers with little hesitation. I understood this type of invite could turn some followers off and they would unfollow me. I sent it to people I thought would be interested and if some unfollowed me, too bad. I probably wasn’t contributing enough to their daily feed to be worthy of a follow anyways if all it took was a silly invite to get an unfollow.
I did get a few unfollows. I also got some follows from the game from people I was attacking. It turns out that I actually gained some really cool followers from this who are in the tech industry and share similar backgrounds. You can never have too many birds of the same feather.
Game Review
It has been about 48 hours since I started playing the game. The first thing I did when setting up my profile was to disable updates and most direct messages. The game gives you extra currency for actions taken if you allow it to tweet notifications for you regarding your activity. By no means does disabling these features hinder you in playing the game. It does take a little longer to achieve goals without the notifications.
It is a shame that the service wants to be so heavily integrated with Twitter updates. The turnoff for most revolves around the fact that having a few friends who have notifications turned on can hijack your feed with a ton of #spymaster posts, which for all purposes are useless for those not playing the game. For a follower who is not playing the game, an update that states “I just acquired a safehouse in Berlin #spymaster” is the equivalent of tweeting “I just scratched my ass”.
For the players, here is the catch about Spymaster initiated user updates on Twitter. Watching others posting activity about their actions is the best intelligence to know when the time is right to launch an attack. When another player has successfully launched an attack is the prime time to attack that player. If you want to get into the game and play it properly, this is how you do it. Twitter now gives you intelligence. But, for the player who is savvy with both Twitter and Spymaster, turning notifications off is the best way to stay covert and avoid alienating your followers on Twitter.
UX-UI Review
I have yet to encounter a bug from the site, which shows that the site was tested well before it was launched. The experience is pain-free, with all actions well defined, making it easy to make correlations between actions, consequences and prizes obtained.
The site runs an AJAX status bar at the top that shows time until next update, assets, health and energy levels. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it does the job pretty well. The user experience is clean and feels like you’re involved in spy game, complete with dark facade, shadows and the lingo commonly associated with international espionage.
Room for Improvement
I have just two suggestions. Games on Twitter will only work if you can play them behind the scenes without turning the service into an action log for the game. Taking Twitter and using it for game communication instead of compelling person to person communication is not good for your game or for Twitter. Finding a way to gather intelligence without getting hijacking Twitter feeds to do it is critical.
I would also suggest the ability to review revenue generated from safe houses. Right now, this is a mystery to me.
Th virality of this game will probably serve as a good model for others who want to create a buzz through services like Twitter. I would encourage anyone who aspires to use Twitter to create an immediate impact for a product or service to check out Spymaster and think of it as one of potentially many ways to create buzz. Overall, I am glad I chose to play the game and also glad I started it on a weekend because its a productivity leech. With Monday quickly approaching, I’ll have to cease my covert operations on Spymaster in favor of those that actually pay the bills.
