Format: HTML
Developer: iList
www.playspymaster.com

Twitter has been good for games – or at least good for anybody interested in them. The platform’s peculiar blend of anonymous intimacy has so far proved perfect for opening up the often shadowy world of big league development, and in the last few weeks – if you’re following the right people – you will have been able to enjoy a fascinating micro-interview with David Braben as he looks back over twenty-five years of Elite, listen in while Ragnar Tornquist provides a speed-run FAQ session for The Secret World, or even revel at the announcement that Lionhead’s Fable team has hit a production milestone and gone bowling.

And, slowly, Twitter’s become home to a handful of genuine games of its own, too, the most interesting of which is probably Spymaster, the spook-flavoured spin on Zynga’s Mafia Wars. A side project by iList, a Twitter-based classifieds site, but available on both Twitter and Facebook, Spymaster’s focus on recruiting followers to your cause can make it feel a little bit like a ludic pyramid scheme at times, but it still manages to conjure a glinting midnight world of treason and swift violence from the sparest of elements. It’s curiously addictive, actually, but even if it wasn’t it would probably still be noteworthy for its claims to bring ìactionî gaming to a platform best suited to telling the world you’re thinking about having a bath.

iList’s game casts players as the head of a spy ring, with the task of rising through the ranks of the underworld by completing missions and recruiting existing Twitter followers. The bigger your outfit, the more powerful you become and, as you grind through the levels, you’ll buy new weapons and upgrades, take on riskier objectives, and even get the chance to stage assassination attempts on rival spies, making off with some of their loot in the process.

Such international intrigue takes place, for the most part, in a simple system of plain menus, where the jet-setting violence plays out bloodlessly in the single click of a mission button, and everything from arms-dealing to knocking off an enemy can be selected from a modest range of tabs and lists. Like web games such as Travian, Spymaster’s pulse is astonishingly slow at first: after an early splurge of activity, you’ll spend quite a while waiting for your energy points to rebuild before you can do anything else at all. (This is the Spymaster equivalent, presumably, of drinking nasty coffee in the front seat of a Cortina while you wait for a dodgy foreign bird to leave her Mayfair apartment carrying a violin case.)

Some players may ultimately feel that, beneath the thin veneer of continental derring do, Spymaster is really a game about relentlessly pressing a button to make a meaningless number get bigger, all of which suggests you could have an equivalent amount of fun messing around with a scientific calculator while humming the James Bond music. For others, things only truly get started once you begin interacting with the rest of the community, kicking off grudges with rival spies you’ve assassinated, or trying to convince your friends to join up too. This is where the game can become a delicate balancing act: Spymaster needs to spread, which means it encourages you to enable notification alerts that go out in your Twitter feed telling everyone else what you’re doing. Although you can elect to turn these off, iList rewards you with perks if you don’t, even though you then risk alienating the followers you’re meant to be recruiting in the first place with a confusing string of imaginary weapon purchases.

The irony, then, is that although it clings tight to the social networks that host it, Spymaster has little use for genuine interaction. For most players, friends never evolve from being raw material for stats, and the bulk of your communication will be meaningless spam to all but a handful of insiders. And yet you can’t argue that Spymaster doesn’t understand the darker impulses of its platform. With its endless levelling and regular rewards, iList certainly has a decent handle on the fierce currents of competition that continue to flow through social networks. It understands that this is a world of cold one-upmanship where you’re probably not logging on to look at your friend’s baby photos so much as to ensure that your own baby is comprehensively better.

Perhaps Twitter and Facebook were already a numbers game anyway, then, their ultimate lure lying with a kind of socially mobile hi-score leaderboard built from the number of your friends – or, to use Twitter’s messianic phrasing – followers. At any rate, that’s where Spymaster chooses to ply its canny trade. This is Espionage 2.0: in the old days, being a spy was all about who you knew. Here, for the most part, it’s simply about how many.