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.

Maybe not everyone.  Gamers seem to be in violent opposition to the idea of changing input methods.  On Slashdot, Gametrailers and other forums I still see people insist that the two-thumb controller is the best input method for platformers, a mouse the best method for Realtime Stragety (RTS), and a mouse and keyboard for First Person Shooter (FPS) games.

Gaming in 1990 (click to enlarge)

I find that reaction disappointing.  For a start, It’s probably not true.  Prior to Quake, most ‘gamers’ (though they did not exist in the same numbers or have the same recognition as a demographic) insisted that a mouse was an unnecessary and fiddly complication to the task of moving a character around, and that looking up or down could be done easily enough entirely with the keyboard. As strange as it seems, gamers and technophiles in general appear to be a very conservative lot.*

Second, even if it were true, and it is a possibility – it is only because the RTS, FPS and platformer genres have been forced to work as effectively as they can the available systems.  They’ve been designed with these input methods in mind, so of course they’re going to seem like the only option available.

Gaming in 2000 (click to enlarge)

When you change the range of input devices, though, the options broaden.  It’s not hard to imagine a shooter where the player can lean around corners, duck projectiles or operate machinery with a little more nuance than just a ‘use’ button.  With RTS games, we could issue two orders simultaneously with each hand, draw out formation plans with gestures or guide the attitude a subordinate AI officer commands with through a facial expression.

While I’m glad that “Motion Control” appears to be the bandwagon to jump on at present, I urge developers, gamers, and the public at large to see motion gaming as a ‘gateway drug’ to better and weirder things. We can turn this into a watershed moment in history not just for gaming but for computing in general, where we decide that the main challenges in computing today are with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), rather than computation or processing.

Gaming in 2010 (click to enlarge)

One relatively recent breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence is the realization that agents are far, far more effective if they are properly embedded in the environment in which they operate.  That means having both consistency of – and plenty of – sensory information. Problems involving vision become (comparatively) simple when a number of camera views are added and combined as input, the problem of balance is made much easier if acceleration and force data is collected directly from multiple points rather than modelling ‘expected’ values internally.

It follows, then, that the task of making sense of what a user wants from a computer would be made easier by giving it more information.  What may be less obvious is that it works the other way around, too.  The more sensory input from a system we have, the more sense the system is going to make, and the more immersive that system becomes.  The “next big thing” in mobile devices after touch-screen interfaces is tactile feedback from interfaces.  The Nokia Haptikos display will try to simulate the press of a button by shaking on confirmation.

I welcome the shift in emphasis of the console vendors.  We need to ignore the grumbling from current gamers and game developers, who are very stuck in their ways.  These detractors are ignoring the trends in gaming that have led us to this point, and where these trends indicate that gaming will go.  I hope that by the time I have kids who are old enough to lecture, I can tell them to go outside and play a videogame.

Gaming in 2020 (click to enlarge)

* As an aside on the conservatism of technophiles, I remember that, at the ripe old age of 10, I was incensed at the suggestion that people were installing “sound cards” and other add-on hardware into IBM-PC compatible computers.  PCs were supposed to be generalized computing devices! If you wanted sound that badly, you should wait until the CPU could process it all in software! If I had heard that people were going to then go on and make cards that dealt exclusively with 3d graphics, I probably would have passed out from sheer indignation.  I was an unusual child.