Room Full of People has announced its third SNAP Summit, set for this October 28th at the gorgeous Parc55 hotel in downtown San Francisco.

While we will not be focusing entirely on social games, this is the premier - and now one of the largest -  San Francisco conference on social network business and development, and how it is changing our interactions on the wider web.  Be sure to check it out - and pick up discount early-bird tickets.

While we’ve covered why game developers should attend InterPlay, I’ll ask the question from the other side - why should Facebook application developers attend?  Here’s 5 reasons:

1. Games engage and retain users. A lot better than most applications do. Learn more about how to make your application keep your audience glued.

2. Good games are hard to design. See 1.

3. It’s a good time for social game developers to raise money. Have you heard about the rounds SGN, Zynga, and Serious Business raised?

4. New people are playing games for the first time on Facebook. Find out who. (Hint: it’s not your 16 year old cousin staying up all night)

5. Games are just more fun. Who wants to work when you can bite more chumps?

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Justin Smith
Editor, Inside Social Games

I’m thinking back to 1999. After a day of sitting in classes, I had one main motivation in 8th grade to finish my homework as quickly as I could — SimCity 3000. While it wasn’t practical that at age twelve, I’d be able to quit school, start my own town, and become mayor (hey, a girl can dream, right?), SimCity 3000 offered me the closest glimpse of it that I could get.

SimCity 3000 was a simulation game, released in 1999, in which the gamer builds and runs his own city, making every single decision about it from start to finish. Every decision had some kind of consequence, and the gamer was able to tell if he was a good mayor by how populated the city became and by another feature I loved — the news ticker that would scroll at the bottom of the screen, displaying important (or sometimes comical) news about the city.

I loved the game for many different reasons:

1. It offered me an escape from the real world (and, being that I was only 12 at the time, my life was ruled by taking orders from adults). In turn, I got to create my own little world in which I called all the shots. I had power over something!

2. It was fun to see what would happen in the city even based on what seemed to be the smallest decisions.

3. I got to create my ideal city, which consisted of theme parks in almost every corner that I could squeeze them into, although they always seemed to catch on fire for some reason… (Maybe that’s why my cities never reached a population of more than 200…)

4. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my older brother made, who introduced me to the game.

5. I wanted to make better cities than the ones my friends made, who I introduced to the game.

The reasoning behind my love for the game brings me to think about one of the key ways games catch on (word of mouth or “virality”) and how this has affected the gaming industry and brought us to the point that we are at today. Whatever it is that brings gamers to this sphere (escapism, control, etc.), it’s got them talking.

Word of mouth has the power to make things spread like wildfire, which is exactly how social networking infiltrated our lives. People saw something they liked, such as Facebook and MySpace, and wanted to be able to use it to connect with their friends, so they sent out invites or told them to join, much like how I enjoyed SimCity and wanted to be able to compare my cities with my friends’ simulated cities. We could either take turns on the computer (but a round of SimCity could last a while) or play separately in our own homes and discuss it later.

In comes my 2008 news ticker scrolling, “Melanie, it’s not 1999 anymore.” Now, with gaming, people no longer have to just tell each other about how or what they do in a game. Thanks to the wonders of technology and the Internet, gaming has changed and allowed people to connect in ways they were never able to before and they can share, discuss, and play each other in real time.

What better way to bring passionate gamers together and expand the gaming industry’s reach than by merging it with another global industry, the social web? The idea is beginning to catch on and is a space that will continue to develop as it spreads like the wildfire that is known as word of mouth, but because social gaming is fairly new, there are many questions to be discussed and answered about the sphere. And I think that’s what we’re going to talk about at Interplay. See ya there.

Welcome, ladies, gentleman, gamers, dorks, and geeks, to InterPlay: the Business of Games on the Social Web.  We have assembled an all-star cast of speakers, and intend to foster one day of high-level discussion among the sharpest minds currently  thinking, writing, investing and start-upping around the intersection of online gaming and the social networks. Social gaming represents a huge part of the future of online games, and the implications reach far and wide. This is going to be a hot space, and on May 22nd, RoomFullofPeople and theMIX agency are putting on the first ever conference to address it.  With participation from C-level execs, VCs, and a few sharp moderators across a spectrum of issues, our panels and speakers will explore the elusive business side of games on the social web.  It will be a day that anyone who cares about the implications of online gaming will be silly to miss.