Design Considerations for Social Games

In this article, game designer Sande Chen describes the distinctive design considerations game designers face when designing for social games.

Social networking sites have changed how we consume information and how we play games. It is only fitting that social games reflect the characteristics of the platform. When combined together, the social graph, ambient awareness, and inclusive play are the design characteristics that make social games distinctive to me.

Social Graph

Games that utilize the social graph cannot be played anywhere else without data portability. Most games do pull data from the social graph for challenges and friends-only leaderboards, but some go further by incorporating the social graph into gameplay. In Parking Wars, I can park on each friend's street and in PackRat, I can browse through my friends' pages.

In order to do well in Parking Wars, I need to know the usage patterns of my friends. I find that these games have the camaraderie of a board game, in that there are conversations about the game among friends, and yet, it's not necessary for all my friends to be online at the same time to play the game.

In theory, any sort of information, like fave bands or travel photos, can be pulled from people's profiles, much like Facebook ads do on the side. Ideally, these games would require people to know something about their friends to do well. Or at least, by playing the game, people would end up knowing more about their friends.

Ambient Awareness

On social networking sites, information flows at a rapid pace. The Facebook newsfeed is filled with information no one would ever write an e-mail about or call to tell a friend. Each piece of information is trivial -- e.g. "Facebook User made a ham sandwich." -- but taken in aggregate, all of it coalesces to form a daily picture of what's going on in the lives of friends.

This clutter of unfettered information leads to what social scientists call "ambient awareness." It's similar to noticing what others are doing in a room without even paying attention to them.

Each bit of information accumulates and without even noticing, you learn that two of your friends were in train wrecks, five have the same birthday, or three are attending a conference in Japan. Unwittingly, people's personal lives are scattered across applications, walls, forums, status updates, notes, and comments. Concurrent or parallel conversations are the norm.

Similarly, if I have ambient awareness in a game, it means that just by playing, I'm aware of my friends' progress in the game. I don't need to search for this information. For example, in PackRat, since I have to cycle through my friends' pages, I see their cards and activity logs.

If I've already gone through that set, then I know exactly which cards they need to complete the set. If I want to learn more, then I can click on my friends' Feats, which are similar to Xbox Live achievements or Pogo badges. As a side benefit, by creating these achievements or checkpoints, the developer can collect and analyze valuable customer data to improve the game.

Inclusive Play

The average user belongs to more than one social networking site, but devotes the majority of time to only one. As such, users have different participatory rates, logging in to one social network every day, another every once in a while, and yet another, only if an e-mail beckons the user to come back.

These different participatory rates translate into different play patterns. Some players have limited time and need a game that can be played quickly whereas others are willing to spend hours on a game. In fact, depending on the day or the social networking site selected, the same user may exhibit different play patterns. Therefore, it's more useful to divide players by play patterns rather than by gender or age. A game with inclusive play satisfies players who want to play sporadically and/or continually.

Obviously, real-time multiplayer social games have an issue if there are not enough friends online to play the game. By continual play, I simply mean that the game provides something meaningful for the player to do to further the experience. If I have more than 1 minute to play a game, then I should be allowed to continue.

Instead, in a game like Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures, I'm forced to wait. Sporadic play is great for multitasking but if you're not multitasking, then the game gives you no other choices to occupy your time. Decisions made with a button click, such as rearranging inventory, applying abilities, or applying potions, rarely take six minutes.

In Mob Wars, the waiting period is required to regain energy. It's patterned after MMORPGs when a player needs to regenerate mana and health. However, in a MMORPG, a player can do something else to get XP without expending a lot of mana and health.

Just like "dead air" is anathema to radio, so too is any time the player is sitting around with absolutely nothing to do in a game, and that is, nothing, not even a look at pretty pictures. There is also the danger that the player may leave and forget to return to the game.

Much as sporadic play appeals to one player type, it doesn't work for everyone. Asynchronous play, however, fares better with its long history in games. War games such as chess have been fought via postal mail and then on e-mail and mobile phones. Players have an understanding of how asynchronous games work. Still, I have seen Scrabulous games fall apart due to lack of response. The notion that players have to come back to a game because it's sporadic or asynchronous is a hollow one.

Games built with inclusive play in mind allow all player types to enjoy the game regardless of whether they have 10 seconds, 10 minutes, or 10 hours to play the game. Most casual games fit this model because a player can keep on playing the same short "coffee break" game continually.

The player gets better at the game and perhaps unlocks achievements, but it would be nicer if there was a deeper experience. Other genres, like virtual worlds, RPGs, and strategy games, can certainly take advantage of this design philosophy.

[This article was excerpted and modified from "The Social Network Game Boom" on Gamasutra.]

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer whose work has spanned 10 years in the industry. Her credits include 1999 IGF winner Terminus, 2007 PC RPG of the Year The Witcher, and Wizard 101. She is one of the founding members of the IGDA Game Design SIG.

March 2010: The Future of Social Games

This month's topic was proposed by game designer Doug Hill and refined by scholar Altug Isigan.

Altug writes:

Social games play an increasingly important role in the game industry. Played over social networks, it is projected that these games will create revenues of a billion dollars in the year 2010. In both recent publications and recent conference talks, social gaming was a popular topic and the potential of these games seemed to create as much excitement as MMOGs did when they first arrived on the gaming scene. Since social games are relatively new, the future of social games still lies ahead; however, many think that these games are the future of the game industry.

In this month’s rally, Game Design Aspect of the Month asks you to have a closer look at the future of social games and its implications for game designers. In order to inspire you, we put forward the following questions:

• How will social games change the way we access and play games? How will they affect the ways in which studios and business models are structured? What impact will these changes have on the profession of game designers?

• Has the language of social gaming been invented? How much of this language is yet to be explored? Are games like Farmville already the “Mario”s of this new platform or are the true “killer apps” still to come?

• It is said that the demographic of social games is radically different. Often the members of this demographic are called casual gamers. However, research indicates that these are “casual” gamers that spend significant amounts of time playing games on a variety of platforms. Social games urge us to reconsider our notion of the casual. What does this mean to game designers and the way they create and make games?

• The issue of virtual goods often brings up the question of the relationship between game worlds and the real world. The walls of the so-called magic circle wear thinner and sometimes it is hard to tell where the game ends and the real world begins. What are creative, business and ethical implications for game designers in this regard?

Altug Isigan is a scholar at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Department of Radio-TV and Film, in sunny Famagusta, Cyprus, where he is writing a dissertation on narrative in games. You can read more of his work at his blog, the Ludosphere.

On Emotive Games: Q&A with IGF Finalist Daniel Benmergui

In this Q&A, experimental videogame maker and IGF finalist Daniel Benmergui talks about his own approach to making games and the potential of games in eliciting emotions.

How do you make emotive games?

I never set myself the goal of making emotive games. It just happened that both I Wish I Were the Moon and Today I Die where born out of intense emotional impressions.

Something I discovered with those games is that you can build important experiences that involve audiovisuals, text and (weak, to be honest) gameplay, without "telling stories". There are very few of these "game poems", which is shame, because there might be a huge audience for them out there.

Do games have the necessary vernacular to tell powerful stories?

I think Jonathan Blow is right when he said that games are never going to catch up with cinema in telling stories like movies do. Any kind of interaction breaks storytelling horribly, despite the enormous efforts of designers to overcome it.

However, I believe there is a different kind of narrative which is based purely on gameplay. That kind of narrative is very unexplored and we mostly stumble in the dark when trying to "author" that narrative that is constructed between players and gameplay.

For example, take games like Braid: a kind of magic happens, where you being to understand and talk with the game in terms of gameplay, like learning a new language. You watch the game objects, with their sprites and animations, but what you really see is how the puzzle works as a whole, and all the possibilities of stuff you can try with the tools at your disposal.

Is there something important in that conversation, in the way a movie can be important? Or you are just learning to navigate a screwed up universe and have learnt nothing that matters?

Those are important questions, but to figure them out, we have to keep learning the true language of games... we can't expect to write good poetry in a language we scarcely understand!

What kinds of emotions can games generate in players?

Most games I've played involve either a high degree of abstraction (puzzle games) or a high degree of adrenaline. It's difficult to explore a vast range of emotions when you are pumped up or using logic brain functions.

But I think the appropriate question is "What can this game make me discover about the universe and myself?" Answering that question would involve a lot of emotions... both in the player and the game maker.

Is it even important for games to make players cry?

There are plenty of games that made a lot of people cry. Most Hollywood movies do that easily, given the proper audience.

But I would prefer games to shock people to the very core, which is something I know books and movies can do. Then there will be crying.

Experimental videogame maker Daniel Benmergui is the creator of Today I Die, an emotive game that brought him a nomination in the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival. `He can be reached at his blog Ludomancy.

Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part II)

In Part I, graduate student Nick Lalone considers Johan Huizinga's notion of play-character as a pathway to invoke emotions in games. In Part II, he compares how various games use play-character.

Most often, video games invoke the spirit of exploration during the time between World War 1 and World War 2. We, as people, think back on a world much larger than it is now. What is out there? As Uncharted 2 begins,

"I never told the half of what I saw ...." - Marco Polo

A world that is filled with mystery taps into the fantastic hindsight we have now through historical documents. Marco Polo headed into a world that none of us could have ever imagined. What would it be like to head into a culture so unlike anything we had never seen? What would it have been like to walk into a place untouched by Roman influence?

Another thing game designers tap into, something that invokes an emotion we can’t describe, is war.

“War, War never changes.” - Fallout 3

War never changes. The atrocities of war are well known to anyone who has ever opened a book about World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Russo-Japanese War, or any war that has ever been fought. Most of the younger generations in the United States or Europe will never know the horror that war brings. The globalization of world industry means that, as Metal Gear teaches us, wars will be fought between nations through a poor nation. Russia and America will fight through Afghanistan, China and America will fight through Korea, etc etc. The citizens of the “Core” countries will most likely fight less and less as the years progress. However, the idea of war is still omnipresent thanks to things like the media, movies, video games, and all sorts of museums. To participate in a war captures an emotional curiosity that reaches almost all of the target audience of video games. We all grew up with parents or grandparents who were a bit “off” due to war. Why, what, and how they became this way is something of a subconscious curiosity. Purchasing a war game allows us to tap into this curiosity, this want-to-know.

However, these things barely tap the play-character. Where the play-character shines in video games is that of environment. For this case, we turn toward Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City did something so few games, or movies for that matter, have done since the 80s ended: It captured the very essence of vice in the 1980s. Maybe it was the voice acting, maybe it was the music, maybe it was the drug culture, but this game had soul. Playing Vice City meant turning on a time capsule. It invoked emotion simply because of the amount of environmental ooze it managed to move. Since Vice City, each Grand Theft Auto has tried to capture a certain time period. San Andreas captured the atmosphere of the race riots in the 90s. Grand Theft Auto IV managed to capture the essence of resolving the gap between culturally favored goals and current available means to attain those goals (anomie): we usually call this deviance or innovation.

Invoking emotion, invoking the play-character is a risky way to bring emotional investment by your players. However, the mode through which a game designer can capture this is not replicable as that of a single event. Still and all, going too far or not enough and players will punish you by not purchasing your game.

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.

March 2010 Poll

Please vote for the March 2010 topic!

You'll see the poll to the right. The choices are:

• Cheats
• Future of Social Games
• In Search of Old School Fun
  

Please vote by February 26. Thank you!

Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part I)

In Part I of this article, graduate student Nick LaLone considers Johan Huizinga's notion of play-character as a pathway to invoke emotions in games.

Video games most often use single person events to create emotion. Some examples here are Death of Aerith in Final Fantasy 7, Permanent Death in Steel Battalion, Modern Warfare 1's Nuke Sequence and subsequent single person death. However, a successful event in profit-driven capitalist societies means that you get one shot at it. After that shot, the reproduction of that event becomes nearly ubiquitous. The death of the pure romantic interest, huge dramatic loss of innocent lives, and other circumstances all become part and parcel of the video game, while many of these reuses add something or take it away (Nuke sequence replaced with killing civilians, etc).





In short, all successful events quickly become rationalized, predictable, and a safe way to generate revenue. Invoking emotion becomes procedure. Now, why do things become procedure? First, like all fields of competition, companies have to do what others do in order to even out the playing field. Second, It requires enormous amounts of research to find a new way to generate emotion in a way that will make players want to buy your game.

However, there is another mode of eliciting emotion that many people do not cater to. We will call this mode by a term familiar to most ludologists: "play-character". The idea of the play-character comes from the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. He defines the play-character in an abstract fashion:

It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. (47)

What he means here is that the way we play is the way society interprets the world. To play is to tap into the play-character, to play is to interpret life.

Huizinga continues saying that as culture continues, “the original relationship between play and non-play does not remain static” (47). Essentially, the play-character, culture’s interpretation of “life and the world” is constantly in motion. In monetary terms, tapping into this is to reach an abstract portion of society that has moved on; to find a way to make money on the past. For, while the play-character ebbs and flows, this play-character is only viewable after it has long since regressed or changed. We typically call this the spirit of the age and tend to block it off in decade form.

Creating Emotions Through Play-Character (Part II) 

Nick LaLone is a graduate student working on an MA at Texas State University-San Marcos. When the video games are turned off, Nick can be found writing about modernization theory, gender, and social media. His work on these subjects with regard to video (and board) games can be found at www.beforegamedesign.com.

Touching Players Emotionally

In this article, game writer and designer Shelly Warmuth explains why emotive games, games that affect players emotionally, involve small ethical dilemmas.

Train changes the rules of gameplay, eliciting an emotional response while causing players to try to change the design of the game while playing it. It makes them uncomfortable, sad, and unwilling to win.

When discussing emotive games, it's important to define the emotion one wishes the player to feel and when we want them to feel that. Certainly, we've all played games that cause us to feel something. A game becomes interactive and "fun" when it elicits a positive response such as laughter, satisfaction, or awe. Consider the last time you caused a huge explosion in a game or laughed at a bit of dialogue. Game designers put in elements to bring forth certain responses on purpose. Most players were touched by Aerith's death in Final Fantasy VII. Insomniac uses amusing quips to obtain giggles and smiles in the Ratchet & Clank series. I found the beggers in Assassin's Creed to be very annoying, while hitting them became very satisfying. Meanwhile, Assassin's Creed touched on my fear of heights and, along with inFAMOUS, created a small fear of water, at least during gameplay. Some games create an unintended emotional response such as anger, annoyance, and frustration. Therefore, for the purpose of this article, it's important to define emotive games as those that involve a player’s emotions, in an intended way, even when they are no longer playing.

To elicit an emotional response, the game must first be immersive. Creating an immersive game is a huge subject by itself but, if elements of the game are jarring players out of the experience, the required interaction cannot be achieved. The player will not suspend disbelief long enough to be affected by the game without being immersed in the environment and story. It must touch them on a personal level and stick with them after play is through.

Immersion is but a small part of the challenge, however. In an age of internet guides and forums, it's difficult to surprise players or sneak up on them. Players don't need to choose whether or not to save the Little Sisters before consulting the internet or guide to see the outcome of the decision. Players hear about the treasure chest that voids the Ultimate Weapon before the game is even in their hand. It would seem that touching a player emotionally then resides in the story, but, it's almost too difficult to avoid word-of-mouth.

One option is to take away player choice. Modern Warfare 2's airport scene is appalling and disturbing. Players walk through a busy airport, mowing down innocent, unarmed people. They can't run or rush the scene. They don't choose the scene, it is given to them and they must get through it. It haunts you long after playing. This uncomfortable scene is a powerful example of what I'd hope to achieve in an emotional response. It doesn't allow player choice, while touching the player's emotions in an intended way once they are no longer playing. It's only one scene, however. Re-creating this response several times in a game would numb the player, dimming the response. This is a fine example of emotive play, but not an emotive game.

The next option involves creating ethical dilemmas in games. While I found Bioshock to be one of the most immersive games I've ever played, choosing whether or not to save the Little Sisters was not really an ethical dilemma. It didn't change the game significantly and it actually becomes a strategy for some. If you save them, you get the better ending. If you harvest them, you get more weapons upgrades and more trophies. Instead of being ethical, it simply becomes a matter of what's important to the player. Likewise, in inFAMOUS, being good or evil fails to significantly affect play or ending. It, more or less, changes the visuals of the game. Fable II, however, creates decision-making that does affect the game without the player being completely aware of the changes they are making. To get an emotional response from this device, then, the designer must design ethical dilemmas into the game that actually affect the gameplay and story. The problem with this lies in the previously-mentioned word-of-mouth. If we create decisions, how do we keep the player from looking up the outcome prior to making the decision? And, how do we keep the player from changing that decision when they get an unexpected response?

We could make it a timed decision, but word-of-mouth means they'll know about the choice before they get to it. We could take away decision, but, we've already shown that, while this creates the intended response in the short-term, it will ultimately fail to keep the player immersed in the experience. We could make games that involve an ethical decision which is merely the lesser of two evils. Again, though, the guides and forums rear their ugly heads allowing players to make an informed decision. Complicated, branching story lines involving many decisions would seem the only, albeit expensive, option, then. In this way, player choices would lead to other choices making them unsure of the ultimate outcome.

In the final analysis, the answer would seem to lie in creating a game that offers small ethical dilemmas. The player should be making decisions with little thought to the outcome. The decisions should seem so insignificant that they are invisible to the player, making them unaware of how they are affecting the game. And yet, the decisions should be significant enough to affect the player in a small way even when making them. Saves must be automatic and seamless so that the player cannot undo a choice. The game should be immersive and the outcome of the story should shock or surprise the player in some way so that they become aware, in the end, that their choices caused that outcome. The designer retains control of the intended emotional response and outcome while giving the player the illusion of control and decision-making. In this way, not only will they be touched by the story and the game, but they will continue to consider the choices they made long after they have finished playing.

Brenda Brathwaite created a game with all of these elements in Train. Players make choices based on the rules of the game without being fully aware of the outcome of those choices. When they suddenly become aware, the game itself becomes an ethical dilemma that touches players long after they have stopped playing.

Shelly Warmuth is a freelance game writer and designer. Her games, Dance Class and Coach's Corner, won top honors in HG4H's InsertCoin. She looks forward to the release of these great games on Project Natal in the near future.