The fall of social media games through the eyes of a Zombie.

Note: The post ended up being more about a single game than the state of affairs in general but it IS relevant and It's currenly 1:42 AM Let a man ramble.

Around 2012 myself and a bunch of people from my school and pretty much everywhere else in this country enjoyed spending time on our national social media site and one of the top activities to partake in on it were social browser games. I know plenty of socials back then were like that and for good reason - having a social game not have to create a social enviroment on it's own is very compeling even if for most games it would basically just boil down to leaderboards, not all of them however were content to slaping social features on just as an afterthought, and my favourite example of such was a game I got to know as "World according to Zombie(s)", but I am fairly sure it was simply called Zombie Island globally.

For those unaware here's a rundown of what the game is:

You're a zombie on an island to make your own, you gotta get materials, plant and harvest plants for cooking, build places to make materials from other materials, get to other islands and exchange collections of stuff you find all in an effor to become human aaaand flex your cool island to your friends who can visit you (and steal your unprotected lootboxes which you can get sometimes for doing stuff). The obstacle? You can't gather materials (other than plants) on your own, you need workers and workers need brains - here's where the social gameplay begins - you get 3 brains on your own you can buy more if you want or for 2 extra a day you can burry your friends, provided you're not burried yourself. Now that's all cool and good but not necessarily interesting, so what is it that REALLY sells the game? Well as per usual it's the ever elusive charm, but for once it's not really about the graphics or sounds, it's the pseudo-worldbuilding (which is a made-up concept (by me) which I absolutely love in games, minecraft has a lot of that). You're not a human, so why would you be doing human stuff the human way? You're not planting sunflowers, not till like level 30, till then you're planting hypnosunflowers and you won't be making oil out of them - if you tell cooks to mix it with poppy you get hypnopoppy which is the core of how you make stuff. You do a thing to get a thing, you mix it with another thing (but you gotta wait for the mix) you take that to a building, to make something else ot of that to put that into making another building so you can use it to get materials for something like the Mobile Phone which in this game is a rotary phone on wheels, the size of like half of a pyramid, because once again - Zombie logic. And you do that till you become a human and then probably do it some more, for the same reasons you play minecraft after killing the Ender dragon. And the charm wouldn't even end there. A lot of materials you'd use weren't exactly what you'd expect. I hardly expectany of you'd consider Light to be a material but well it is. Love was one too, and the reason I'm mentioning it is because you could gift your stuff to your friends, but you could also give them some things for free. And what can a Zombie gift their friends for free? They can give them stuff like theirLove, their Time, Peace, the likes. Remember, it's a game about figuring out how to become a human. The sneaky bastards used that to make it vaguely philosophical at times.
So where is the game? Well the social media site I played it on closed in 2021, the game was availabe on Facebook from what I heard but It's gone now too and the FB page claims that happened in 2021 as well but I know my island was gone as early as 2018 and for a long time I thought that was it, that I will never get to play it again. Well I wasn't exactly wrong, but as is the case with many a thing related to socials - it went mobile.
Well it's not the same - you start on what would previously be your SECOND island, you CAN and have to chop down trees, mine rocks and cut bushes (a new feature, really) by yourself and you have to uncover the island bit by bit. It is not the same game. It doesn't go by the same name either. But it uses the same assets - the same graphics, same music, same plants, materials, buildings, collections. The whole pseudo-worldbuilding is here, now with an actual story and slightly more invasive moneization opportunities, but with nothing particularly predatory and it's called Zombie Castaways.
To be real I was frustrated playing a game so similar yet so different from what I remember, I was already thinking what it would take to mold the game into what it once was, but I had a sense that I can't quite get mad untill I reach the Big Land - Originals home location and once I reached level 12 I finally built what I needed to get here.

I was home

So far I have no idea if any other island also functions like the good ol' times but honestly this was enough for me. They made it work on it's own merit with it's own gameplay loops, and I don't really think the gameplay is worse. The big bad problem is the social features or lack there of. Maybe they will suddenly re-appear if I log in with facebook but even if that's the case I sincerely doubt any of my friends there play it, hell I doubt most of them even realize you can still play games with facebook, they make it very hard to get to the few they still host on their site. A whole bunch of games had to move - Galaxy Life, another classic a bunch of my friends used to play is now a standalone PC game and good for them for making that choice. Hell being on Steam gets you right back to being able to use the same social features you would back then, but it doesn't seem many old titles go that route. When both the gameplay and the target audience are closer to mobile Steam isn't exactly ideal, and Apples and Googles mobile alternatives just don't have the same feature set, not that Castaways interacts with either, which does once again beg the question: What would it take to add the missing functionality as a mod, maybe even have it hosted here? No idea. Don't even know if it would work well with the new gameplay, where brains make far less of an impact, but It sure would make it more fun to decorate the island knowing people will actually see it.