Gaming with Twitter and Facebook

Twitter and Facebook are here to stay and the recent addition to a number of games has proved that, by allowing you to let your friends and acquaintances know that you just beat the last boss of Uncharted 2, or that you just purchased a song on your console of choice. However, is it really a good feature to include in a game, or does it just add to spam and pointless updates that people will ignore?


Micro-blogging is a great idea when used as intended. Unfortunately for us, majority of the population use it to keep you updated with every second of their life or to push hashtag trends that have no real weight. Now, with it being added to Xbox 360’s dashboard and games like World of Warcraft (Tweetcraft) and Uncharted 2, we’re seeing our twitter accounts flooded with information that really isn’t needed.

To test tweeting with gaming out, I actually made a second account in fear of the updates hijacking my actual twitter account. While some programs and games allow you to define what should be tweeted, the pointless options are still there and will be unwittingly turned by some users.


Tweetcraft for WoW has the functionality to update your Twitter with every transition between zones. For an end game character doing daily quests and farming, this would soon fill up your feed with unwanted updates. I ended up using the achievements tweeting, as it was really the only reasonable Twitter update to publish. One feature I did like a great deal was the ability to take an in game screenshot and upload it to Twitpic, allowing your friends to share your experiences without having to wait for you to find a place to host said image and link it somewhere.

Popular gaming messenger clients Raptr and Xfire have recently integrated Twitter into their functionality. Again, as with Tweetcraft, it’s full of unneeded update options, such as: Update when loading a game, Update your daily played games, so on and so forth. An example of where this would fail is when you have a game that you’re tweaking to work perfectly, jumping in and out of it. You’d end up having 20 or so updates letting people know that you had stopped and started playing the game.

As much as I love Twitter and would like friends to know what games I’m enjoying, I’m going to give this functionality in video games a big thumbs down. It’s not what Twitter was designed for and borderlines on spam advertisement

Along with Twitter, Xbox 360’s dashboard recently got a Facebook update, allowing users to browse their Facebook account on their TV. Sony’s PS3 also got a similar update, optimizing Facebook for the system’s web browser, along with Facebook updates for trophies, store purchases and game events.


Features of Facebook for consoles are very similar to what games offer with Twitter. A lot of the functionality can be toned down or up at the user’s digression, however, majority of the options just shouldn’t have been included. The PlayStation 3’s trophy updating is poorly thought out and integrated, updating with posts for each game and their trophies, when it could just have one post with a summary of what was achieved. The PS3 update really feels like a rush job to compete with the 360’s integration. Especially, in regards to the optimised Facebook browsing, this could have been implemented in the same way as Microsoft went about it with the 360 dashboard.

Twitter and Facebook integration into games, firmwares and messenger clients feels like a cheap cash in on social networking. Steam is one of the only platforms to actually get it right, having a personal control panel with your friends’ recent history. A history page like this, would have worked much better on PS3 and 360 in terms of offering a service where you could keep up to date with your friends progression and purchases. Until this functionality moves away from pointless spam and unorganised chaos, I’ll be avoiding it.