In polite company: rules of play in five Facebook games

Applications developed for the popular social network site Facebook frequently take the form of online games, but designers need to consider the conventions governing politeness, aggression, reciprocity, and obligation carefully in both online and face-to-face communities when structuring the rules of game play in the context of highly formalized and conceptualized social networks. In particular, the combination of egalitarian mechanisms for "friending" across generational and class lines and extremely hierarchical systems of ranking on leaderboards among particular cohorts can make it a challenging environment for creating sustained and synergistic game play.