Social Heroes is a pervasive social game in which players trade points by tagging each other using Twitter. Through the accumulation of tags and points in defined combinations, they earn achievement awards and gain the ability to create their own tags and achievements.

Taking the metaphor of APIs from software development and drawing parallels between the way we model game state, Social Heroes attempts to provide a ludic interface for our personal relationships. The result is a system for social play surrounding identity, relationships, and communication.

Social Heroes was built with PHP and MySQL on top of the Twitter API.

Social Heroes was my thesis project for my masters at ITP. You can download my thesis paper - Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction
and here's my thesis presentation discussing Social Heroes: