Social Fun
Moroagh’s excellent blog continues to have thought-provoking pieces on game design. This time around it’s a great post on social fun, looking at an often neglected quadrant of Nicole Lazzaro’s four types of fun.
This is an important aspect of family gaming that doesn’t fit the all to heavy if not pure challenge model of “hard fun” alone. We play social games not just to gloat and be proud of the achievement of our beloved ones. We also play social games to socially interact, learn about each other, foster social skills, form bonds, explore others in a safe context of an artificial game environment, learn to cooperate, learn to give in, learn to support, learn to empathize, learn to see things from someone else’s perspective, learn to argue with grace, learn to be able to accept that multiple points of view are present, learn to cope with interpersonal frustrations, learn to unwind together. And of course learning to not gloat and be a graceful winner as much as a proud and respectful loser.
A lot of social behaviors are about the ability to not win for the sake of someone else, to forgo competition for the sake of preserving a social bond, to seek activities that are cooperative rather than competitive.
I couldn’t agree more; and yet, the picture is pretty tangled.
The big reason why I tend to put Hard Fun as central to the overall games picture is because the hard fun is usually the motive cause bringing together the social participants. The activity that the players collaborate on is usually a “hard fun” problem; meaning, it’s a task primarily rooted in cognitive challenges that presents obstacles to overcome, etc etc, in classic “theory of fun” style.
In fact, it’s difficult to find game or even free play scenarios that don’t include a core element of hard fun in some fashion. Hard fun, as in the solving of a “puzzle,” seems to underlie many things, including even social relationship things and aesthetic reactions. It’s not hard to read the above paragraph of Moroagh’s as a series of particularly tough ones:
learn about each other, foster social skills, form bonds, explore others in a safe context of an artificial game environment, learn to cooperate, learn to give in, learn to support, learn to empathize, learn to see things from someone else’s perspective, learn to argue with grace, learn to be able to accept that multiple points of view are present, learn to cope with interpersonal frustrations
It’s definitely easy for games to fall into the trap of only fostering the Hard Fun, and that would be a mistake. If I had to pick a “second most important” type of fun in games, it would certainly be the social fun piece, because games are inherently social activities throughout most of history.
6 Responses to “Social Fun”
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to buy was for people trying to overcome separation with others they wanted to play together with. Above all social fun disappears if you simply cannot do things together. Raph’s Website :Social Fun
The number one lesson I learned from Everquest (about games) was this:
What builds community is shared pain.
Essentially, the struggle of the game was unifying. As much as I wouldn’t sing the praises of their approach, they really did force people to come together, and the strongest bonds were formed through shared trials. This isn’t to say that community won’t come together on its own without this element, but rather that the need for Hard Fun is something I can also see.
We can say social gaming has the potential to teach us this, that and the other wonderful make us a better person thingy, but the devil is in the details. We’re running the danger of making the discussion so abstract that it’s almost impossible to drag it back into reality. “Hard fun” isn’t abstract – or at least it wasn’t until Raph gave it a name. I’m lucky enough, once in a while, to come up with something that’s fun – but come up with something that’s actually fun and teaches values? Although I can think of a few examples, I believe most of those were lucky accidents. Designers love to claim it was all part of their master plan after the fact and maybe I’m the only one who designs by failing and iterating many times until I get lucky, but I doubt it.
So how do you turn this critique of the state of social gaming into something concrete I can actually use when I design my next game?
A game being social doesn’t at all preclude hard fun – if one believes that 4-quadrant model. But it’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy to assume that hard fun is the glue or primary force. It certainly does not explain the successes of Habbo hotel or a lot of what is going on around Sims. People have fun there, a lot of it and they stick with it. I can’t help but think that the theory that “hard fun” has primacy has many real life counter-examples.
That doesn’t mean that “hard fun” isn’t great for many people. It just means that maybe we work with too simple a model for what we can already observe.
So being social doesn’t preclude hard fun. But I don’t see, just looking at what is around, that fun requires hard fun – even prolonged and persistent fun.
I would argue that one of the many factors in the underprepresentation of social in computer gaming is that the power of the other 3 forms of fun are often underestimated.
It’s the old theory that the “core” will stick around and carry your game. I’m not sure if that theory really holds up nowadays when looking at Sims or WoW or Habbo hotel or Second Life or social networks or casual gaming. The “core” may hold you up if you maximize for “hard fun” primarily though.
Why? Well because the whole “core” theory centered about the challenge model of “hard fun”. We see a lot of people playing games or related fun activities that have a lot of “soft” and “social” fun. One can criticize Sims dominating the PC retail sales charts, but they sell “soft fun” (and likely also social fun), and there is a market for it.
Some people may be challenge addicts. But some people play catcher not to continuously improve their hiding skills but because its a social activity, and not getting found after a while is about as bad as getting caught immediately. Some people play bridge competitively, some play it because it’s a card game where you interact with a partner in the game. Some play tennis to improve and get better, some play it as a fun outdoor activitiy with someone else, with the added benefit of exercise – and they will play even if the person on the other side poses no “hard fun” challenge.
What is nice about these examples is that the game designs allow “hard fun” but they don’t force people to embrace “hard fun” as their mode of operation. Rather people are free to seek the type of fun in the activity that fits their mode of operation.
“Hard fun” as the primary fun model seems to me to kind of assume one personality type: i.e. those that constantly seek challenges and possibly rewards from challenges. I don’t think that covers the full spectrum of fun or personalities, even fun that can and we can see work in games.
It is very hard to justify “Bingo” as fun on a “hard fun” model. What’s the “hard fun” of going to a theme park (those skill booths are often way empty while the rollercoaster lines are stuffed) or a cocktail party? And we keep going over and over.
And as I said in the blog post, the emotional models are geared towards challenge-related emotions, whether it’s Nanches or Schadenfreude. But certainly there is way more. In fact most emotions I know are not challenge driven. Taking MULE and WoW, a lot of soft fun really makes these games. In MULE it was the silly races and the quirky Disaster/Reward tickers. In WoW it’s running jokes, off-the-wall cultural references, fun animations etc (there is no “hard fun” in jumping in MMOs but people still enjoy it, for years). I would in fact argue that if you remove from MULE and WoW these components they become distinctly much less fun without any change to the hard fun component, and that even for a “core” crowd. In fact, purely subjectively these games really seem to live and die not by their hard fun component but by their “secondary” and “ternary” fun aspects. Take MULE again, bidding there is “fun” not only because it’s a set hard challenge (that would be difficulty to quantify) but because it inherently causes social interactions (tricking, supporting, discussion/bartering etc). MULEs economy would be less fun without that design.
We have a small gap here in our definitions of hard fun, I think. I DO explain a lot of Habbo Hotel in terms of hard fun. Or a theme park. And MULE. And so on. What I am getting at is that what all of these tend to have in common is a cognitive challenge — in social terms, the cognitive challenge is each other, in visceral terms it’s mastering your own body’s responses, and in aesthetic terms it’s understanding what triggered the emotional response.
This explicitly means that hard fun (which I just call “fun” myself) does not have to be limited to traditional conceptions of a “hard fun” style game. It’s not necessarily bound up in surface definitions of skill.
Nicole’s framework is based on emotional responses from users; it’s the constellation of emotions that can be evoked, grouped into clusters based on empirical data. I’m suggesting that under that, there’s a common set of factors.
Raph, I’m a little confused about this line: “This explicitly means that hard fun (which I just call “fun” myself) has to be limited to traditional conceptions of a “hard fun” style game. It’s not necessarily bound up in surface definitions of skill.”
Is there a not missing in there, or is it just way over my head? What is a traditional conception of a “hard fun” style game if you were saying that hard fun has to be limited to them? Moroagh seems to have a conception of “hard fun” style games that doesn’t support your use of hard fun, so I’m confused as to how that’s consistent, unless you’re just missing a not.
But I think what you’re trying to say is that hard fun is the result of dealing with a cognitive challenge, and that most emotional responses result from some sort of cognitive challenge or other, basically, most of what we do is an attempt, at least on some level, to better understand, and thus begin to gain mastery of, the world around us (and ourselves), right? Or I am totally off base?
Yep, there was a negative missing in that sentence. And your conclusion is exactly correct, that is what I meant.