Game Review: I Like How Booyah is Blending Social Gaming and Social Entertainment with Nightclub City

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I really like what Booyah is blending social gaming and social entertainment with Nightclub City.

Nightclub City is similar to the many farm-, city-, mall- and restaurant- building games on Facebook in its core concept and social engagement elements.

You try to build the best nightclub in town by decorating it to increase its luxury, stocking up the bar to keep the drinks flowing, hiring bartenders and bouncers to help pour drinks and kick out the jerks, playing DJ by mixing music from upcoming real-life musicians, building an entourage of regulars, and inviting celebrities to make your club more popular.

You can invite your Facebook friends to become your neighbors, include them in your entourage and dress them up, hire them as bartenders and bouncers, send them gifts to help them decorate their clubs, visit their clubs, and earn money by stocking up their bars, or playing guest DJ while they are away.

Even though it is similar in core concept and game mechanics to other Facebook games in the genre, Nightclub City is setting the gold standard for style amongst social games. Each design element is dynamic: lights flash, floors light up, fountains flow, walls sparkle, and robots serve drinks. Plus, you are spoiled in terms of choice: you can buy an almost endless variety of attractive floors, dance floors, walls, bars, seating and other items to decorate your club.

The non-playing characters have distinct looks and personalities: the dancing girls rock on, the high rollers party in style, the regulars come back for the music, the party animals come back for the drinks and often puke, the jerks pick up fights and need to be kicked out, each celebrity is modeled after a real-life celebrity. All these characters, and your friends, move around the club, order drinks, dance, order drinks in happiness when you dedicate a song to them or do a bass drop, and leave in unhappiness when the club gets too crowded.

Then, there is the constant stream of daily giveaways of achievement badges and premium virtual goods for throwing out troublemakers, dedicating songs to guests, dropping the bass or guest DJing frequently; building up the club’s drink storage capacity, luxury score, or popularity score; selling more drinks, entertaining more people, earning more tips, or saving more money; and having more high rollers or celebrities party at the club at the same time.

It’s incredible that, with so much going on, Nightclub City has stayed non-spammy. The suggestion to publish items on your or your friends’ walls, invite or message friends, or gift items to friends are all subtle. The game mechanics encourages collaboration, not competition, and the game has no leaderboard. So, it’s a good game to play with your partner and, on a typical evening in our house, both my girlfriend and I have Nightclub City (and Miri Ben-Ari) running in the background.

Which brings me to the number one reason why I love Nightclub City: it’s not only pushing the boundaries of social gaming, it’s also pushing the boundaries of social entertainment. I discovered Grammy-winning Israeli hip-hop violinist Miri Ben-Ari on Nightclub City and so have many of her 100,000 fans on Facebook. Booyah licenses music for Nightclub City from real upcoming musicians and is positioning itself as a music promotional platform and signing up even more musicians.

Imagine the possibilities here. What if you could import your iTunes playlists into Nightclub City? What if you could not only like Miri Ben-Ari’s page on Facebook as you are listening to her music on Nightclub City, but also buy her music from iTunes? What if you could pay Miri Ben-Ari to guest DJ at your club? What if you could pay celebrities to visit your club, by liking their page on Facebook? I am sure Booyah will continue to push the limits of social entertainment with Nightclub City.

It’s not surprising then that Nightclub City has gained 4.5 million active users since April and was ranked by Inside Social Games as the No. 1 Best Facebook Game of 2010, even though Booyah didn’t do any advertising for Nightclub City in its early days, and has still kept its ad budget minimal (Booyah CEO Keith Lee in an Inside Social Games interview). Interesting, Booyah only claimed Nightclub City last week, claiming that it wanted to Nightclub City to become big enough in stealth mode.

Nightclub City fits in with Booyah’s vision of “creating new forms of entertainment to the masses by bringing together elements of the real world and the digital world”. Booyah’s location-based game MyTown, available from the US iPhone app store, is a good example of their real-virtual hybrid approach. You can buy and own your favorite real-life locations, collect rent when other people check-in to your shops and upgrade your shops to increase their value. MyTown is the biggest location app today — bigger than Foursquare — with 2.7 million users.

I have written before that I’m really excited about services like SCVNGR and Geocaching that merge the real with the virtual — see my killer startup idea GTTGTHR (Get Together) that merges game mechanics, location, intention and transactions. I’m now adding services that merge social entertainment with social gaming to my list of trends to watch out for.