A few months back I started playing through all of the main (free) Social Games available – I went through most of the games by the two major figures in the space, Playfish and Zynga, and a handful of the offerings from other competitors. I’m hoping to turn this into a series of posts on my observations through these games.

Why can’t you play nicely with the others?

One thing that struck me about these Social Games is how little social interaction actually occurs.  Mafia Wars, the most popular social game, puts you in the position of a mafia boss.  Friends of yours who also subscribe to the game comprise your mafia.  You are able to request assistance on specific jobs from your friends, give them gifts and swap special ‘collectible’ items with them – but participation goes no further than this.  All that distinguishes one friend from another is their name, avatar and experience level.

In fact, for a price, you are able to enlist random strangers into your ranks, who behave no differently to your peers.   Equally, you are treated in an identical manner – your name used as a largely meaningless token in your friend’s Mafia engagements.

So?

To an extent, this is an inevitable part of gaming – if I create a game-world with a limited complexity of representation, some features of my personality will be rendered irrelevant.  The fact that I like long walks on the beach is likely to be insignificant in a game about intergalactic space battles, just as my intergalactic space tactics are likely to be unimportant in a game about long walks on the beach.  In Mafia wars, though, not even my views on the Mafia make the cut – not so much as a D&D-style moral alignment or request to sacrifice progress toward one goal for another.  Likewise, any charitable acts I engage in – sending out an “Energy Pack” or giving a gift to my peers – carries no consequence to me.  The items are not available to me in the first place other than to give to others.  Without any opportunity cost there is no decision for me to make, and no way to make my mark or distinguish myself from other players.  When I play, no aspect of how you play has any impact on my game’s representation of you, and vice versa.

How it normally works

Most multiplayer games have been based on either symmetrical (largely turn-based) or synchronous play.  Symmetrical games like Chess require that for every move that you make,  I make one too.  Synchronous games like Warcraft 3 and Halo  rely on the fact that we are both given the same opportunity to act – they assume that every player is giving the game their full attention,  so that any difference in impact comes down to a difference in skill.   It’s not possible to rely solely on these techniques for creating a multiplayer experience in the social space –  I may rack up ten times the average play-time of my friends in a week.  A symmetrical, round-robin approach would mean that nine-tenths of my time in the game would be spent waiting for others to catch up, while a synchronous model would require that I be online at the exact same time as my friends in order to collaborate.

These traditional methods for creating a multi-player experience may fail in a larger social context, but they were  also designed for a different quantity of players.  Chess requires exactly two players to allow a game to proceed, and games like Warcraft or Halo require between 2 and 16 players.  A typical social game has players in the thousands – Mafia Wars has membership in the tens of millions.

The second difference is in the length of engagement.  A Counterstrike match  is generally around 35 minutes, and a game of Warcraft 3 can last between 30 and 120 minutes.  Mafia Wars and Pet Society offer a single, persistent game experience which lasts indefinitely, often with players racking up 30 minutes or more every day of the week.

Options

The differences between normal videogames and “Social Games” do close off some possibilities for how to establish a shared experience, so while we can’t rely on symmetrical play patterns from a core set of players, we can make use of much longer time-scales and a vastly larger pool of players to draw on.

Rather than a single, one-to-one sequence of interaction, social games can make use of the wider network of contacts – engaging in multiple parallel ‘quests’, each one requiring roughly equal participation from its members, where the number of quests allows the player to scale their level of involvement.  If I play 2 hours a week, I might participate in 3 quests,  where someone who spends 10 hours will join 20.

Another approach is to let the game play itself – or at least to for friends to interact with a simulated version of the player,  which is refined over the course of their play-time.  Say I’m predictably good-aligned in most games (I am.) – If a friend of mine requests my assistance on a mission which requires some morally dubious action,  It should be possible for my approximated self to decline any requests to participate.  If it is necessary at some later date to request the services of a character with such dull and unflinching moral fortitude, My virtual character may offer his services up (or at least ask me directly whether to do so).

That’s weird.

While breaking the convention of a game following a single, coherent thread, or providing a simulated copy of me and my behaviours sound like strange approaches, this is essentially already happening in these social games.  Many avid “Social gamers” are registered in several services – and often several accounts – suggesting that thy feel that the maximum level of engagement available under a single game / account is insufficient.  Likewise,  any time a character bearing my name, experience level and portrait appears in a social game, it is effectively a simulation of me.  It just so happens that the simulation is  so poor that no two characters with the same level of experience can be considered behaviourally distinct.

What do we get out of this?

Using either (or both) of these approaches, we can come closer to having an actual social game experience.  By relaxing the requirements for symmetrical participation, we can play alongside a number of friends – and be playing with them, rather the  poor approximation we have now.  By relaxing the requirement for synchronous play through improving that approximation, we open up new opportunities for participation.

There are countless videos on Youtube of people trying these things out – stacking barrels in Farcry or balancing helicopters on top of other helicopters in Battlefield: Vietnam.  Constance Steinkuehler, an academic in the field of Educational Communications & Technology, asserts that kids in Lineage and World of Warcraft have been unwittingly conducting experiments according to the scientific method in order to understand the world around them!  This behaviour seems to be quite common.  If you look through any forum dedicated to a game you’ll find extensive write-ups of all the units, power-ups and a weigh-in on whether something is worth having or doing.  Http://strategy.diii.net, a site for Diablo II, h0as links to strategy guides which outline the principles of experiment design. A site dedicated to World of Warcraft,  thottbot.com, calculates the probability of a monster dropping an item to three significant figures!

In one respect, this is a wonderful development.  People are using rigorous, principled methods of investigation in order to understand the worlds they find themselves in.  On the other hand, those environments are not only artificial – video games are necessarily artificial – but worlds with such a feeble resemblance to reality that no relevant knowledge can be gleaned through experimentation.  This is tragic.

This is not an attack on all games, though.  This frustration is aimed at worlds that purport to some degree of realism – racing games where an autopilot takes control when you spin out (Ridge Racer), or momentum values that are tweaked with no justification to make a spacecraft more maneuverable as a game progresses. I don’t think all games have to have Newton-perfect calculations of mass and velocity, but I think there ought to be games that at least try.

Towards that end, here’s another update of what I’ve been working on.  It’s really hard to resist holding off on an update because I’m so close to a breakthrough, but I’ve found that after one breakthrough is made, it always seems ‘close enough’ to the next to hold off again. Consequently, there’s a lot in now that wasn’t in the last build. The list of what’s new is probably less interesting than the thing itself, so here it is:

• Colour sliders: Now, rather than relying on the colour of a mirror being made on the fly, you can select the colour of all the elements, setting a laser to beam only red light, or a mirror to reflect only yellow light etc.
• Rotation: Works now.  You click to select a pivot to rotate the selection about, and drag around to place ‘em.
• Tooltips: Finally, there is a little feedback about what things are and what to do with them!
• Cirlces: Only work with lasers at the moment, but they are solid, circular mirrors that could be considered to have a “mass”.  One day.
• Polygons: These do work with beams and lasers, but do some silly things with beams (when you point the beam on to an angle less than 180º) . These could also be considered to have mass one day.

What’s next?  Remote loading and saving (I’m going to need some help with PHP for that), and then Box2D!  I’ve been messing around with some ideas for games that could actually use this engine, and I’ve come up with one idea, which I’ve sketched out on my Flickr page, but that’s as far as it goes right now.  When I have more, I will show it!

Rude’s argument centers around the alphabet, and how “learning your ABCs” does not give a person knowledge of all aspects of the alphabet – for example, the number of letters between ‘d’ and ‘l’, or which letter is five letters after ‘n’. He says that whether this knowledge is useful or not is by the by, but I think the whole argument swings on it.

What Rude overlooks is that there is nothing inherent in our usage of the ABCs that would lend itself to developing a familiarity with the place a letter has in the alphabet. The way we would typically answer these questions – counting the letters off on our fingers while we sound out the alphabet – is perfectly adequate given the infrequency that such a task will come up. If you take a Scrabble player, though, and ask how many points any given letter is worth, and there’s a good chance they will know. This is because while it’s not the aim of the game to know these numbers, it does help to bear them in mind when coming up with high-scoring words.

On the other hand, the number of each letter in the alphabet doesn’t help with much. When we’re concerned with the order of letters, we’re mostly arranging things in order, and don’t care beyond what comes before and after a letter. Rude admits that even concerted effort fails to lodge this information securely.

Basically, a skill or fact must bear relevance to the task at hand if it is to be remembered. Irrelevant things fall by the wayside, and no form of learning – incidental or directed – will keep them in our minds.

Another thing Rude mentions is the difference between directed (formal) and incidental learning in music, and how he believes that someone who lacks formal training will never be able to grasp the difference between a major and a minor chord. I have a bone to pick with that conclusion too, but that’s another matter.

Portnow uses the example of the main adversary in Final Fantasy VII, whose name is “Sephiroth”.  In the game, Sephiroth is a pretty stock-standard villain; there is justification for his ill-doing, description of a muddied relationship with the protagonists and so forth. According to Wikipedia, the problem is that “Sephiroth”, or “Sephirot” is a Hebrew term which means “The ten attributes that make up God.”  I wouldn’t be surprised if even that is a gross simplification of what it’s supposed to mean, but it’s already a stretch to go from “properties of god” to “main bad guy.”

My problem with the disparity is that fans of the game will develop an image of Sephiroth the character, and believe that there is some relation to Sephirot the concept.  Misuse of important cultural and historical icons has been popular through the ages, but Final Fantasy is especially guilty -  making no distinction between mythical figures in Aztec, English, Norse and Japanese lore.

That’s not to say terms like Sephirot should be off-limits, though.  If the ten properties of God (consciousness, love, vision etc.) can be integrated into the design of the development of the character, or the story, it might be a reasonable place to use such a heavily-loaded term, but when words have historical significance -  and particularly religious significance, then we need to be careful to not to be too clumsy with them.  There’s an important difference between provocative and stupid.

I think that this practice is benefitting from these terms because people are likely to know that they are significant, but be unsure of what that significance is.  If a term is used in a videogame, players are likely to feel pleased that the term is being presented in a context that is approachable, and are likely to assume that the game’s use of term has at least some relation to the real-world meaning.  It can be difficult to un-learn these spurious associations, and if a developer can’t integrate a concept as interesting as Sephirot into their game, they don’t deserve to use that label.

Unfortunately, incidental learning has already been taken by a field.  A paper by that name was published by Sandra Kerka in 2000, and it has been part of Education theory since then, if not before.  Fortunately, though, it means exactly what I want it to mean.  Here’s Kerka’s original definition:

Incidental learning is unintentional or unplanned learning that results from other activities. It occurs often in the workplace and when using computers, in the process of completing tasks.  It happens in many ways: through observation, repetition, social interaction, and problem solving; from implicit meanings in classroom or workplace policies or expectations by watching or talking to colleagues or experts about tasks from mistakes, assumptions, beliefs, and attributions, or from being forced to accept or adapt to situations.  This “natural” way of learning has characteristics of what is considered most effective in formal learning situations: it is situated, contextual, and social.*

This is fantastic!  This means that there’s already a critical field of study proposing theories and coming up with experiments to validate the position of incidental learning as a method of teaching!  Digging a little deeper, I found that most definitions of incidental learning mention computers at one point or another – even better!

It’s not perfect, though. The field has a tendency to focus on the education aspect rather than simply establishing an engagement with the student/player. My focus is slightly different – by placing the interaction at the center of focus, the learning aspect can remain a convenient byproduct.

See also: Definition of Incidental Learning at Edutech Wiki and Roger Schank’s Engines for Education for more on the educational side of things.

* Kerka, Sandra 2000, Trends and Issues 2000 Alert No.18, Incidental learning

I think what Koster is talking about is this:  After concentrating on the electric guitar for four years, a person may have developed the equivalent of two years of xylophone training, one year of drums and so on.

This model is suggested in most physical fitness plans (so I am told,) although after a certain amount of specialization, it’s often suggested that a person’s more general fitness actually decreases, given the finite resources that the human body has.

We need to be cautious about suggesting that training for one thing will result in losing skill in another, since it gives us an excuse not to perfect one particular skill set. The way in which a human being can incorporate a variety of different skills is what makes us great, and in particular, the incorporation of a diverse (and seemingly conflicting) set of mental skills is probably the coolest part.

I also think that the breadth of knowledge that people get from learning a single thing is very different. Someone learning the guitar for 10 years may only have the equivalent of 5 years’ skill by the end of it, but may end up equally skilled on trumpet, vibraphone, violin and the drums.  Conversely, someone may end up with 15 years’ worth of skill on the guitar, but be completely useless on everything else.

With musical instruments, it’s easy to see that an accoustic guitar would be closely related to an electric, where a banjo or a ukelele would be slightly less related.  If we look at sports and take baseball as the central sport, then it would make sense that softball and cricket would be closely related, and that soccer and football may come into the mix too, but to a lesser extent. Somewhere in the distance, someone’s snooker skill may improve too.

What about quadratic equations? Very few people will ever use quadratic equations for any reason other than to pass the test on quadratic equations, but we learn them anyway.  If we think about this breadth of knowledge, though, we can see that we aren’t just learning about quadratics as we stare at the graph paper and crunch the numbers.  We might learn a little about algebra, graphing, calculus, and possibly things outside the realm of mathematics altogether.

Basically, everything that we do has unintended consequences.  Destroying an enemy base tends to damage civilian infrastructure, and we call that Collateral Damage.  It’s terrible, but it’s taken largely for granted.  What isn’t taken for granted, though, is that learning about one thing tends to make us think about other things.  I like to call it Incidental Learning, and I like to talk about it a lot.