When I first downloaded Clash of Clans, I deleted the game a
short 15 minute session later. Despite the cute graphics and sleek interface,
the city building and battle elements seemed too shallow compared to the deeper
games I grew up playing. It wasn't until a few months later that I started
playing again, with a clearer goal: I needed to unlock the clan castle so I
could join the clan my coworkers wouldn't stop talking about. I’m happy I did,
because I've being playing for two years and have discovered a fun game that
takes many months to expose a surprising amount of depth. But had it not been
for the social element, I would never have given that game a second chance.
Later, when I started working for Supercell (the developer
of the game), I was further exposed to a fascinating amount of social activity,
both inside and outside the game. What stuck the most with me was how a small
amount of dead simple game rules encouraged and shaped a wide variety of social
organization and behaviors. I spent an entire summer moving somewhat randomly
from clan to clan, in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of the social
dynamics that drive the game. What I found was a varied collection of
"societies", many of which had structured their own habits and norms
in profoundly distinct ways. I found myself in some "my word is the
law", strong leader dictatorship-style clans; in some "we're just
here to have fun, no pressure"-style democracies; and a lot of complex political
variations in between.
What, exactly, is a social game?
At the end of the last decade, Facebook games somehow gained
the right to be called "social" games, possibly as shorthand for
"social network" games. The "social graph", the vast,
interconnected list of relationships between Facebook users, was touted as the
next frontier for designing new, unique social experiences in games. By getting
access to a person's real life relationships, the thought went, we can design
meaningful game experiences around those relationships. What happened in
practice was very different. The vast majority of developers who flooded into
the scene were blinded by Zynga's wild early success, making copycat games they
would never want to play themselves, using extremely short-term metrics as their
gospel, and abusing the social graph so it served their own virality needs, rather
than providing any sort of value to the player. This all led to the well
documented decline of Facebook games (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/203912/with_the_luster_of_social_games_.php).
But to call the decline of Facebook games as a general
decline in "social" games is a mistake. Defining a "social"
game as a game that is played on Facebook sounds to me a little bit like
defining a "platformer" as a game that is played on the Nintendo NES.
Since I will be using the term frequently both in this and in future posts, I'd
like to clarify what I think of as social games.
A social game is a
game that provides at least one type of social structure.
A social structure (within
the context of a social game) is a persistent, dynamic, well-defined group of
human players that can interact and participate in meaningful in-game activities
together, either synchronously or asynchronously.
Persistence is an important element in my definition, and is
one of the key elements I use to distinguish between social and merely
multiplayer games. A social game to me is something that supports repeated
interactions between players in the context of the social structures they
belong in. An RTS game with only a lobby where you find random opponents to
play with each time is therefore not social, just multiplayer. However, in many
cases players can and do form social structures even if not supported directly
inside the game (i.e. Clans in the early Quake years). The more such social
structures are encouraged (both in game and outside of the game), the more
social it is under my definition.
Guilds, Alliances, Clans are the most obvious and common
in-game social structures. A game like World of Warcraft is a social game,
since a guild is a social structure and raiding is a meaningful in-game
activity in the context of that structure. The early Facebook games may or may
not be considered social under this definition, depending on the kind of
interactions they allow between friends, and our definition of
"meaningful".
With the definition out of the way, the next questions I'm
interested in answering are: what makes a *good* social game, and what how do
we keep improving the experience in future social games? Here are some of my current, still evolving thoughts
on these questions.
A good social game uses the appropriate channels to discover other human players in a way that maximizes the chance for meaningful, long-lasting social bonds
Among the people who saw promise in the Facebook social
graph were some prominent game developers who I think genuinely thought about
the problem, and tried to provide value to the players by using their real life
social connections (instead of abusing those connections for self-serving virality).
Despite those efforts, I have not seen a game that uses the real life social
graph in a ground-breaking way, that provides real, never-before seen value to
players (if I missed them, please let me know and I’ll be happy to add such
games here).
This does not mean that it is impossible to achieve player
value by using their real life social network connections in game. But it does
mean it is very hard. It also means that not all game experiences benefit from the
social network connection – I actually think that many of them not only don’t
benefit, but actually are hurt by them. Here’s a screenshot from Empires and
Allies:
I don’t know about you, but for me, even if my real life friends
were actually this cool and good looking, I would still find it awkward that
they have to invade a fictional game world in this manner. Seeing my mom, my
baby cousin, my University professor, my accountant, and that guy I met once at
a conference and never really talked to after, being an actual part of the game
world, not only does not help my game experience in any way, it kind of ruins
it completely. Why are those people there in the first place? They would never
be interested in such a game anyway.
For most people and games, the optimal in-game social graph
(i.e. the lists of connections to other players that provides the best in game
experience) will have little overlap with the real life social graph.
So what would a good primary mechanism be for discovering the
players in the game that make up this optimal in-game graph? This, of course,
depends on the game itself. We need to think about what experience we are aiming
for our players to have in the game, and then follow up with more thought and
experimentation on how to enable them to find others that will enable that
experience. Some games rely a lot on randomness: you are thrown into the game
world, along with everyone else, and given the tools to communicate with them.
Who you interact with first will depend a lot on random factors like where you
are placed in the world and who happened to be near there at the time. While
that’s a reasonable starting point, we may be able to do better with both
in-game and out of game tools that assist our players find exactly the kind of
people that would enhance their enjoyment of the game.
The real life social graph can still be very useful in-game as
a secondary discovery mechanism. It can help which of my real life friends are
already playing the game I’m interested in. That reduced form of the graph is
the simplest, most practical and useful application of it I’ve seen so far. In many
games, teaming up with or fighting against people I already know is more
exciting than doing so with strangers.
A good social game uses social structures and game rules in unison, in order to create deep, meaningful, primary emotions
During the summer I was visiting various clans in Clash of
Clans, I experienced one of the most intense feelings I had while playing any
game. I was preparing my troops for a crucial war attack and chatting up my
clan members who I had a rocky relationship with (apparently joining the clan
and immediately telling them they're wrong about what troops are good for
defense was a social faux pas). Regardless of our petty differences, I liked
some of the members of that clan and considered myself close to them. Besides,
shouldn't we all be worried about the other clan who was, up to that point, winning
the war? A couple other guys and myself were formulating a come-back plan and
felt pretty good about our chances. And then, during a chat exchange where I must
have been slightly more snarky than I should have, the combative elder who was
against me joining them in the first place, kicked me out of the clan. To my
surprise, that felt extremely devastating. The next hour was filled with wild
thoughts that maybe the other elders who liked me a bit more would reverse his
decision and invite me back before the war ended, so we could win that thing (I
was pretty high level, and because of how wars work in Clash, they had no
chance if I wasn’t able to do the attacks as part of the clan. And winning a war
is a significant time investment for the Clan, most of them consider it a big
deal). But... no such luck. The “Come back” message I was expecting never came.
The feeling of betrayal was real, and it stung. I caught myself thinking about
the incident for days after, and even tried to return to the clan for a quick
chat to get some kind of closure.
I've had similar moments and feelings in other multiplayer and
social games like Neptune's Pride and OGame. No single player game has ever
come close to generating the same intensity of feelings, including the ones that
have carefully crafted stories specifically intended to bring out similar feelings.
The difference in intensity is pretty clearly caused by the fact that in the social
games, I am personally the one being affected by the game events. In Clash, I
myself was betrayed and kicked out of the clan –not my in game avatar. I had
worked hard to give the team a fighting chance in the war, and instead of a
thank you, I was backstabbed right at the end. This is a completely different
thing than seeing your in-game avatar get betrayed in a scripted single player
story (even on the ones where you don’t actually see it coming).
Daniel Cook has written on the difference between such
"primary" emotions (caused by things that happen to you), and
empathy-style emotions (caused by things that happen to someone else you relate
with), here:
Like Daniel, I would love to see our industry focus more on
these "primary" emotions, because they seem to be something that is
making our medium unique. No movie or book has ever reproduced the intensity of
such emotions for me. The only thing that came close, the Red Wedding, was likely
similarly intense only because it was elevated to a primary emotion because of
the fact that my wife was 9 months pregnant at the time I watched it. Worse,
the storytelling techniques we seem to be disproportionally borrowing from
movies and books can backfire badly in an interactive setting, where the player
is supposed to be in control of their agent's actions. The Last of Us was
completely ruined for me because at the end, I was forced into multiple decisions
of vast consequence that I would never have done had I been in the
protagonist's shoes. If it was a movie instead, I would go "ah, I get why
he did all that, poor guy," think it was a pretty good movie, and move on.
Now, I’ll never forgive the game because it severely violated my sense of
agency with that character.
My own experience has been that the "primary"
emotions we can experience in games, the feelings of gain, loss, betrayal, desperation,
hope, are greatly amplified in a social setting. This is not always a good
thing for the game developer. Very often, the emotions are so amplified that
people are actively driven away from the game in shame, anger or frustration. I
witnessed a lot of people quit Clash of Clans completely because they couldn’t
handle the social pressure of having their war attacks watched and judged
publicly as they happened. Regardless, I believe more research here is an area
of opportunity, especially for niche developers who don’t care about appealing
to the mass market. An intense social feeling that may be a turn-off for most
players could be the unfulfilled desire for a particular niche.
A good social game does not require complexity to drive depth
The social experience I discovered in Clash of Clans and
described in the opening paragraphs was, of course, nothing new. Good social
games, many of them MMOs and MUDs, have been growing these kinds of varied
societies for decades. But what was news to me, what I was not expecting, was
specifically the amount of variety that was enabled by Clash of Clans’ very
simple gameplay and rules. Compared, for example, to Star Wars Galaxies, a game
where the depth of the social interactions are largely driven by the complexity
of the game's locations, professions, races, factions, in Clash, the very
simple Clan Wars feature, was enough to also create social interactions with
depth. Being able to observe the kind of social interactions that occurred in
clans, before and after the Clan Wars feature was implemented, was very
enlightening. Rules and game context shapes social behaviors, and this was my eye
opening moment where I witnessed a relatively simple game feature completely
change social dynamics. It certainly got me thinking about what other behaviors
we can drive as game developers, what other distinct social game experiences we
can create, without piling on complexity.
What will the next generation of social features look like?
I would love to see our discussion of social games move
beyond the social network platforms and meaningless terms like casual/mid-core,
and start talking about the social structures themselves. How can we enrich the
experience in existing social structures, by adding new or different rules and
interactions with gameplay? How can we create all new, interesting social
structures, and what do they look like? How can we incentivize players to
create their own types of informal structures? How can we manage our
communities in order to drive positive behavior in these in-game social
structures?
In an effort to move the discussion towards that direction,
I am providing my list of social feature ideas that I’ve been developing over
the past few months. These are semi-random thoughts on features I would
personally like to experiment with, both as a developer and as a gamer. Where
applicable I list games that I think have adopted these features to some
extent. I’m sure I’ve missed many, so please let me know of other ones you know.
Government Types
Alliances/clans/guilds/neighborhoods are a key social structure
and we should always keep looking for ways to make them more meaningful,
interesting, and diverse. One such way could be to allow the clan to choose
between predefined governments, with different options allowing different
trade-offs on how the clan is operated, what roles it offers its members, what
kind of benefits the members get, and how the clan progresses and gathers fame
within the game.
For example, familiar government types could work in some
games: Monarchy could boost the participant’s army strength at the cost of
higher taxes, or democracy could allow higher resource production but weaker
defenses. The choice of government type could also be a status symbol for the
clan, telling the rest of the world what the clan’s worldview is in the game.
Governance of the entire game world
Single-shard games can take advantage of their non-compartmentalized
world by allowing a very powerful Social Structure that can affect the entire world
for all other players. As a very simple example, each season, the top X players
in the world could be assigned to the Senate, where they can vote among a set
of proposed boosts that will apply to every single player in the game for the
next Y amount of time. This is interesting and engaging not only for the top
players who compete to enter the Senate, but also for the other social
structures the Senate members belong to (other players or groups will want to
approach Senators and influence their decision, perhaps via incentives the game
allows them to offer).
Secret Societies
The feeling of belonging to a “secret” organization is very
powerful. A game could evoke very unique bonds and excitement by allowing the
creation of either formal or informal secret societies that are separate from
other regular social structures. These secret societies could have their own
agenda (which could lead to some very interesting combinations with other
social structures, i.e. the Senate discussed above). The Secret Society would
seek to spread fame of the organization among regular game members, while
concealing the identity of its members. Other non-members could be given the
incentives and tools to try and expose the secret society members - especially
high ranking members. Some would try to infiltrate the Secret Society in order
to spy on them, adding to the overall drama and excitement.
Role Conflict
Roles are important in any social structure, as they give
meaning and purpose to all members of the structure. A good social game focusing on
roles reinforce
certain social roles by making them more desirable via game rules; promotes diversity by making social roles balanced (so people of different skills and
interests can be happy in different roles); and provides guidelines on appropriate behavior for each role (even though it's sometimes
perfectly acceptable for some of those rules to be broken).
Role conflict can add an interesting twist here. Any game that allows an individual to hold an
important role on multiple social structures can create interesting
dilemmas/conflict of interest type situations. For instance, a player who is
part of both an Alliance and a Secret Society could be thrown in Alliance War
against a member of the Secret Society. How will they react?
Diplomacy
Traditional 4x strategy games owe a lot of their depth to
interactions between the player’s faction and other AI- or player-controlled
factions. Social games with mechanics that support players or groups of players
playing cooperatively or against other players/groups may benefit from the
ability for both sides to be able to communicate with each other and negotiate
terms for war/peace/assistance/betrayal. The communication functionality itself
could be as simple as in game chat, but the game must support potential
negotiations with the appropriate features such as donating units, releasing
captured units, exchanging tech, or ability to surprise allies and enemies with
concealed actions. Supporting such diplomacy features between actual players is
a huge untapped area and vastly more promising than diplomacy between a human
and an AI - humans have the ability to surprise, remember, hold grudges,
scheme, in a way no AI will achieve any time soon.
Neptune’s Pride and Subterfuge are two games that provide
extremely deep diplomacy using an extremely bare-bones in game chat screen. The
depth comes from in-game features designed to support diplomacy (i.e. gifting
part of your army, directly funding weaker players, freeing enemy heroes taken
prisoner in battle).
Ad-hoc groups/Social Events
Most social groups are intended to create long-lasting bonds
between their members, and so naturally are intended to be permanent. For some
kinds of games though, creating groups in an ad-hoc way (perhaps as part of an
event) could mix things up in an interesting and fun way. These temporary
groups can also create bonds, especially if it leads to the formation of another,
permanent social structure.
For example, imagine an event-based strategy game. As part
of an opt-in event, certain players are put in a group (Defenders) and are
required to defend their bases against a much larger group (Attackers). After
the end of the event, and regardless of the outcome, it's likely some of the
defenders or attackers who liked each other will form separate, permanent bonds
(i.e. join the same alliance).
I’d love to hear more from other developers on the subject. What
are your favorite social games? What’s the most exciting moments you've experienced as part of a social structure? What are the areas you’d like to see
further experimentation in social games?
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