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Are you a Facebook user that is constantly being bombarded with Mafia Wars and Farmville gifts and/or invites? Were you wishing you could have that same kind of experience on your Xbox 360?

Then you, my friend, are in luck! Gary Hall, Director of Platform Development in the Xbox division has just filed a patent related to “Viral Gaming”. This includes not just a simple game of Shotgun McRunfast shooting space zombies in the face with laser rockets, but a sort of meta game that involves getting lots of your friends to sign up for the service too.

While we aren’t sure what real game applications this could have, here are a few of the ideas put forth in the patent:

“…one user from a group of users is randomly selected. His or her biography is posted on a message board accessible by all users. The race is then on to find a buddy chain that links a user to the selected user. The selected user may be identified by players communicating with others and creating buddy lists to connect to the selected user. This drives new social relationships, encourages buddy list expansion and increases time online. In a modification of this game, a user may be given information about someone else who is a number of degrees of separation from the user’s buddy list. The user then needs to connect with others to identify the selected person.”

“game of tug of war between two players, where the victor is determined by the number of direct and downstream players accepting an invitation to join one team or the other. Traversal maps sent with each invitation may show how large a team is getting, how deep the invite levels were and where the players are from. In a slight variation, invites may be weighted, so that invited users who are geographically farther away are worth more than invited users who are geographically closer.”

Sounds… interesting?

(source)