Social Sworcery

“To the mountain folk of The Caucasus he was known as ‘Logfella’ & he seemed cool.”

That’s not the way most video games would choose to introduce you to a main character, but then, SuperBrothers’ Sword & Sworcery EP isn’t most video games, and there's a very specific reason they chose that particular language. First, though, here's a quick explanation of what we’re going to be talking about:

SuperBrothers’ Sword & Sworcery EP is a 2-D adventure game (like The Legend of Zelda, or The Secret of Monkey Island), served to you on the iOS platform with gorgeous, brilliantly stylized 8bit-esque visuals, and a soundtrack so lovely it’s worth buying/listening to even if you have no intention of ever playing the game. Oh yeah, and the game is super-fun, and the interface is wonderfully intuitive. Essentially, the whole thing looks, and feels, and sounds quite like a dream coming out of my iPad.

But even beyond all those praises, Sword & Sworcery has a really clever trick up its sleeve; one that puts it right in our media/marketing/engagement crosshairs. When you examine any element (be it part of the landscape, a character, an object, or even an event) during the game, an activity that becomes a pretty common occurrence as you play, a short bit of descriptive text pops up offering you an explanation of what you’ve chosen to take a closer look at.

So far, that seems pretty normal for a game of this sort, right? Here’s where it get’s really smart: Each of these little descriptions is an expertly worded tweet--a little nugget of story that will look smashing in your Twitter stream. Conveniently, each time these tweet-worthy explanations pop up you are (unobtrusively) given the option to tweet this message to your followers.

And here’s why that’s really so smart:
First of all, it’s a seamlessly integrated feature. It doesn’t pull you from the game, and it doesn’t take you out of the app; it just posts it, and adds a few relevant hashtags like #lore or #sworcery. So you can keep on playing without really thinking about it.

Secondly, it lets your friends and followers know you’re playing this game, gives them a sample of its flavor, and hopefully interests them in the game’s story. These people are already following your feed, so they have some frontloaded investment in your opinion. With very little effort, Sword & Sworcery has tapped directly into an influence network. Good job, guys, that’s the kind of thing that social media teams, PR wizards, and marketing agencies struggle ceaselessly to do.

Lastly--and this one’s truly fascinating--it provides the game’s producers with real-time feedback on who’s playing the game, what kind of progress they’ve made, and which elements they found most interesting or engaging. All you have to do is search any one of the game’s hashtags to see what users are up to.

Certainly, not everyone that plays the game elects to tweet the things they discovered throughout, and I imagine only the most pedantic of users tweet EVERYTHING they find. But that filtration process is important to the analytics. It creates real, usable data on which game content connects with players. Also, by comparing the number of people that tweeted any game message with the number of game purchases made, you can see what percentage of players are using your product and how far into it those players are getting. Look at their timestamps, and you can determine peak hours of play. Turn your eye to geotargeting data, and you know where your players live and play.

These are the kinds of game analytics that are usually only available to HUGE budget online games. SuperBrothers has managed to glean that same information from Twitter without ever having to pay for servers, proprietary analysis software, or hosting and transmission costs. All they had to do was play smart.