High scores started in the arcades. Whilst “Insert Coin” flashed at the bottom of the screen the rest was a leaderboard of the best player with only 3 letters to identify them. Arcades were gaming hubs and being top scorer meant you were the best in the local area.

Those 3 letter names were infamous in friendship groups and you know who you needed to beat. It created a social incentive to want to be better than your friends, play one more time and put more money into the machine.

With modern online gaming the leaderboard is back. You can now see how good you are at the game compared to the rest of the world. But knowing you are 231,321^st out of 2 million players isn’t as impressive as being in the top 10 in your local arcade.

Some of the most powerful incentives we have are social ones, and trying to be better than millions of other people will only compel the few. We need to make the leaderboards local and unique to each user. This creates a much higher social incentive and makes players play more to beat their friends.

Games are turning our social circles into personalised leaderboards. Every user has a unique leaderboard that only shows the scores of their friends. Being the best of your ten friends is a lot more compelling than being better than millions of strangers.

The beauty of these modern games is that they can always be connected online. They can always be plugged into our social circles.

This means no one ever needs to play a game in isolation (unless they chose to) it also means you don’t have to play a game with everyone, you can choose to just play with the people that matter to you.

Now when I play Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook the game is constantly reminding me of how I am doing compared to my friends. I don’t know if I am the best player in the world, I don’t even know if I am in the top million, but it doesn’t matter.

What I do know is that (for a short while) I had the highest score of all my friends and it was great, but my high score just encouraged others to play until they beat it.

This is just the first step soon games will go beyond reflecting your social circles scores. They will start using our social circles to make our games more personalised and unique to us. Our experiences will be used to enhance other peoples games and we are starting to see the beginning of this with games like Spore using our friends creations in our game to make our experience matter just that little bit more. I expect a whole lot more of this over the coming years.

Now I must go and get the top score again on Bejewelled!

My mum is an addict. It isn’t drugs or drink or anything taboo no this is much worse. My Mum is addicted to Farmville.

For those of you that live in caves without internet (how did you get to this blog!) Farmville is a hugely popular game on the even huger social networking site Facebook. How huge? Last month Farmville had over 26m users, and that was a slow Christmas month! Last I checked Facebook had around 300m users, meaning that Farmville is being played by around 10% of those people!

Players of Farmville spend most of their time Farming. Ok you’re not asked to get up at 4am to clean the pigs out, but you must look after your crops and animals and try to sell them to make more money. If Farmville was just that though it wouldn’t have trounced Harvest Moon for the Wii, a better and more involved farming game (although it does cost a few quid more).

What has made Farmville such a storming success is the social basis it is built from. Before you have even planted your first crop you are encouraged to gift a farming item to a friend, whether or not they play the game. The more friends you have playing the more likely you are to get daily gifts in return for your farm.

The game is designed to be played in short bursts over a long period of time. With some tasks requiring you to return on a daily basis.

So how did my mum end up playing this game? The age old water cooler talk. Unless you work in a particularly geeky office video games are not really a hot button issue around the water cooler, but since Facebook has gone mainstream so has its games.

The water-cooler talk once reserved for celeb gossip and soap news has now been taken over by a game. As a gamer this makes me very happy (even if the game in question isn’t that good.)

My mum is addicted not so much to the game but to the social experience it offers. She speaks to her work friends online and at work and while sometimes the conversations are about virtual farming they are often about other things. Farmville has given my mum a way in to the office conversations and also an excuse for her to be connected to her friends.

Social networks and social gaming have gone mainstream people. My mum says so!