Speaking at #gdc11: Social Mechanics, again
I am doing a revised, streamlined version of my Austin GDC talk on Social Mechanics, this time sprinkled through with more references specifically to social games. It’ll be at the Social and Online Gaming Summit, Monday at 3pm. Here is the event listing:
Social Mechanics for Social Games [SOGS Design]Speaker/s: Raph Koster (Playdom)
Day / Time / Location: Monday 3:00- 4:00 Room 134, North Hall
Track / Format: Social & Online Games Summit / Lecture
Description: Many have accused social games of not really being social. But they are underpinned by many classic social mechanics that drive interaction and community-building. Some of these have been proven to work in other genres such as MMOs and are beginning to filter into the social games market; others are easily visible and quite familiar in real life, but have yet to be seen in the design of social games. In this talk we will draw from both proven game design and from anthropology and sociology and explore the social potential of social games.
Takeaway: Learn about core human psychology driving social games, and walk away with a clear list of game mechanics that encourage social structures and human relationships, thereby driving retention.
Eligible Passes:Summits and Tutorials Pass, All Access Pass
I will endeavor not to take an hour and 15 minutes this time. 🙂
10 Responses to “Speaking at #gdc11: Social Mechanics, again”
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I caught it in Austin & really enjoyed it — hoping I can squeeze in and catch it again. They need to start giving you bigger rooms at these things, as every time I see you talk the room is packed. That or I can’t get in because it’s at capacity.
I think I am in a 1000 person room this time, so… you should fit! 🙂
I was on the DCUO forums over the weekend proposing a tweak to the reward system for the solo challenges, and I was met by a wall of vitriol and hatred for having the temerity to suggest something that might slightly undermine the dominance of the tank/spank/mez/heal forced grouping paradigm.
I’m becoming less convinced that the next quantum leap in MMO gaming is going to come from established developers and fans locked into existing conventions. It may very well grow out of the social gaming arena as these games continue to gain depth and sophistication.
And it pains me to say that. It feels a lot like throwing away 15 years of work and starting from scratch.
From another medium, it happens, Yukon. I’m playing for tips in a coffee house. All the way back to the beginning with one guitar, one mic, one voice. Is it the same? It’s similar. In music or most performance art, once a group is lost, one starts over. Everytime. The advance is in chops and styles mastered, particular signature pieces etc. It becomes conversion time where I throw out a half to three quarters of a songbook and start replacing parts. Everything I learned in ensemble has to be replaced or adapted to solo. That means finding a new approach to old numbers, etc.
I think that’s how the game market works as well, please correct me if I’m wrong. There will be bits that can transition and become new again. Others drop away. No bang in the new act.
So I wonder if you looked again at what you do in terms of repetoire and asked yourself what you would build in the new environment or platform as a single or small team developer (same as a new room going solo or duo), what would you drop? What would you keep?
Just an exercise in analogy, but perhaps, seminal.
I’m becoming less convinced that the next quantum leap in MMO gaming is going to come from established developers and fans locked into existing conventions. It may very well grow out of the social gaming arena as these games continue to gain depth and sophistication.
And it pains me to say that. It feels a lot like throwing away 15 years of work and starting from scratch.
Well, I don’t have high hopes for the quarters I feel are most likely. The serious games movement is struggling to understand itself right now, but when they have a decent self-identity, they’ll undoubtedly start taking the political subtext seriously and respond to it. Maybe that will hit the MMO segment, maybe it won’t.
The other quarter is the disillusioned academic, of which I am one. I know there are others out there with better track records than I, and perhaps one of them will decide to make a push and succeed with it.
In other words, the “quantum leap” may come as a response rather than a magically new direction, which would still take advantage of the past 15 years. For what it’s worth, I am working on something right now, but I’m still at the “shiny idea” stage.
I think that’s how the game market works as well, please correct me if I’m wrong.
The difference is mainly that your songs and performances have a definite ending. The games market is doing okay (most games still have definite endings, and are thus iterable from the beginning); it’s the MMO subsegment that’s stagnant. My friends and I played the RIFT beta, and our running joke was, “Me: I haven’t played WoW. Friend: Yes, you have. It was called RIFT.”
I don’t really like the way I ended that last comment, so let me throw in a “serious game MMO” idea that I had last year as an example.
Archiving the below on my personal website: The Melting Pot
The “serious issue” theme is race relations. This is instrumented through a series of expansions to the game. So let’s start out with some boilerplate. Take your usual “rape the countryside” advancement trees, and take some inspiration from Vanguard:SOH having three spheres of activity… gallivanting, making stuff, and diplomacy. Since I’ve never played WoW, pull more inspiration out of RIFT’s invasion mechanics (or EVE’s Sansha Incursions) as a carrot/stick on getting players to work together cooperatively and lose access to quest hubs or whatever on occasion. Now take the cue from WoW/RIFT and split out two superfactions based on race: you’re either Green or Purple, or whatever. You can have the usual factions to curry favor with… whatever floats the designer’s boat.
The game opens on a civil war between the two races. (I think my original idea had three initial races.) Each race has a special shiny: maybe an extra way to make weapons or maybe special techniques for combat or whatever. The important thing is that it’s intellectual property, and it’s cultural in some way. In any case, it’s worth having. Players pick a race and their goal is to acquire that shiny. You have three basic options: integrate, subjugate, or pillage-and-burn.
The pillage-and-burn path is via espionage, torture, and what other unsavory means of looting and theft we can come up with. You take their shiny and you kill all the members of the inferior race. Genocide. Endgame. This means that the losing side no longer gets to have new characters. This is important.
The subjugation path is much the same, except that it’s a straight out, clean cut military win. You enslave the losers and take their shiny without wiping them out. You have your cake and eat it, too. The losing side gets to continue having their characters, but their lot in life is an asymmetric game of being mechanically oppressed. As a bonus, they get to organize uprisings if they want, and they may even successfully overthrow. This makes the pillage-and-burn option more appealing.
The integration path is the moral high ground. It’s done through diplomacy mechanics. It’s an everyone wins path, but it’s boring. You do have a clear victory point: when you get the shiny: but you still have to tediously maintain the integration and it may slip at some point and you’ll lose access to the shiny again. Hooray for grind!
So there’s a clear game over, right? Expansion time! The expansion uses some random gimmick: settlers from over the sea, natives in a newly discovered land, etc.: in order to introduce a new race. The new race brings new shinies. The new race does odd things to established mechanics, making it hard to simply out-and-out repeat the last strategy. Players are allowed to create characters using the new race… but again, if the race is genocided, they lose those characters.
I’d imagine you could make the mechanics deep enough to ensure that no path lasts less than a year realtime. You could create classes and specializations, incentivize these with quest designs and random encounter designs in order to favor all three paths in a fairly balanced manner, which would encourage internal conflict over which path to take. All the paths can be run in parallel: you could have one hand sending ambassadors all the time while the other hand is achieving tangible victories while the third is compiling secret knowledge. The diplomatic path might block a military victory by sharing important information; the military path might make a diplomatic promise sound disingenuous.
Break the critical mass and they won’t all cooperate. This gives you plenty of time to do your tweaking, your bughunting, your UI upgrades, and your expansion plans. I’ve left out all the details, but this is a blog comment, not a design document.
I’m sure there are plenty of problems with the above, but I think it’s very clearly informed by the past while also very distinctly a step outside (above?) the current morass. You might disagree (I would like to know why), but that’s my thought.
For performance acts, evolution is a matter of ‘must haves to compete in the environment’. When the big rooms began to collapse in the late forties, the big bands collapsed down to just a few. Small rooms sprang up and bop (small form impro driven jazz) replaced them. At the same time and in almost the same space, rockabilly emerged from country swing (a big act format) and blues (a small act format, ethnic and a niche). The audience of hipsters was replaced by teen agers. This might have remained niche too except for the wealth of the American teen agers, the use of low budget movies to exploit their dating habits, car radios and the novelty of TV where low budgets and live shows benefitted from smaller cheaper acts.
The phrase for that music was “cheap and disposable”. Rearview mirror judgements use different evaluations but at the time a hit lasted as long as the time it took to suck down a milkshake and take two turns on the floor. The ‘ending’ part isn’t as important as the ‘replay’ part.
We’ve already seen that games don’t require rich to the metal graphics. We know that we can do better with immediate communications but social networks arre thriving on asynchronous communications. Gas prices are going skyward again, the entertainment budget for a family becomes more precious, lots more have big screens and kick bunny sound systems at home, and there is a move for more family to live together longer.
Monopoly always goes to the same place, but it isn’t hard to play, lasts an evening, and is almost always fun to replay. When you consider all the easier alternatives to playing an MMO that deliver the same or better social networking, it simply may be time to close the big rooms and find the blue light basements where new things are being tried or old things are being done with fewer players. IOW, the MMO market seems to be falling into the same chasm as has developed for music where as Tim Bray describes mobile apps: lifestyle and the web.
Need less, wait longer, make do with a 1000 fans.
Rift: “You got Guild Wars in my WoW!” “No, you got WoW in my Guild Wars!”
I don’t want to be unnecessarily cruel towards Rift. The team put in a lot of effort and it shows — it’s a premium product. But… yeah, it’s a premium product we’ve already played.
And the social game? Hrmmm… the whole rift thing actually does provide a nexus to draw people together to accomplish a common goal. But after the goal is achieved, there’s no particular reason to hang around, chat, and make any connections beyond that, and it’s too intense to have a conversation during a Rift event.
You know… I’ve said it before, and it sounds trivial, but one of the things I miss most about modern MMOs is the ability to SIT in a chair. As I recall, it took a clever sprite manipulation to enable sitting in UO, and some tricky scaling work to enable it in SWG, but it was worth the effort. Sitting is like a placard reading, “I’m not currently doing any goal-oriented questing or farming and am free to engage in social discourse”. Such a subtle visual cue, but one that can have a profound impact.
I don’t want to be unnecessarily cruel towards Rift. The team put in a lot of effort and it shows — it’s a premium product. But… yeah, it’s a premium product we’ve already played.
For what it’s worth, I have played neither WoW nor Guild Wars, so I found it vaguely novel. Unfortunately, I’ve also been listening to people talk about those two games since they came out, so nothing surprised me.
I’d disagree that the social mechanic of rifts doesn’t work. The reason you don’t hang around and chat is because of other mechanisms: global chat, guild chat, party chat, etc. Socialization isn’t a function of placeness, here. In Dragonrealms (I am never going to stop mentioning Dragonrealms), global chat is weaker and certain mechanics (efficient healing and teaching classes) gives reason for people to ground themselves at common gathering points after a major invasion is repelled.
My take is that it works, but everything else in the design works against it, wiping out its impact. I think this is a prime example of thoughtless design by tradition having an unintended effect.
The slideshow (which is excellent, by the way, but you knew that) addresses social mechanics, but I’ve veered off into the related but distinct topic of the mechanics of socializing. Chat systems and their effects on immersion vs. augmentation definitely deserves further discussion.
Michael, your proposed game sounds interesting. Most faction vs. faction (vs. faction) games I’ve played depend on maintaining the conflict indefinitely for the life of the game, or on hitting the reset button whenever one side ‘wins’. Perhaps the closest I’ve seen to what you’re describing are the null-sec dynamics of EVE Online, where the factions designed into the game are supplanted by player corporations.