Okay Geek Farm
Apple's Gamecenter and Finding Friends
Connor Scalleat
A short while ago, Gamecenter was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Gamecenter was supposed to be a network to share scores with your friends, win achievements, and have an all-in-one place for your games that you already love. I have recently discovered that the serviceis quite interesting — getting achievements while playing Zen Bound was very satisfying along with the beautiful UI of the app.
But there is only one thing missing, perhaps the most important thing, there is NO way to connect with your friends without knowing their username, email, or name! Your probably thinking what’s the problem with that? The problem is if you don’t know what friends are on the network, what’s the sense of trying to search and find them? Now that this quirky problem has been posed the solution is almost too easy — integrate social networks into Gamecenter.
If Apple would integrate Twitter and, or Facebook for friend finding, that would make the whole product more satisfying and social. Along with making the users happy (being able to finally fill up their “friends” list), Apple could allow you to spam share your achievements which would allow great exposure for Gamecenter.
Due to this flaw in Gamecenter I would currently have to give it a 5/10 due to half the experience missing, which is the ability to add friends (which is sort of the point). If they do solve this problem, then it would be an easy 8/10, the other two points are missing due to the amount of games on the network — but once the product is around for a longer period of time, the games will come, integration will become tighter, and after that, Gamecenter could easily deserve a 10/10, unless it doesn’t fix these issues. Tell me what you think about Gamecenter in the comments below.
