About Game Design

I don’t know what you think, but for me, a social game, as opposed to an anti-social one, is one that requires a significant portion of the skills that I am pouring into the game to be of social nature, e.g. friendship, empathy, and loyalty, to name a few. From that point of view, a purely competitive game, e.g. deathmatch, would be anti-social, so we’re not simply talking multi-player games here.

Whenever there is more than one person around (to a lesser degree, this includes NPCs), there is potential for some kind of social relationship. The problem is that the thing most dangerous for any such fledging social relationship is the game itself, or rather its rules. To be exact, it is the win/loss conditions, even if there aren’t any explicit ones: Perceived ones will do just fine.

Since every player apparently has at least implicitly agreed to play by those rules, there is an unspoken agreement that just about every kind of behavior is ok, as long as it is by the (game) rules. The most common type of emergent behavior will usually be caused by a player’s urge to win the game, and most of the time it won’t be one pleasant to the others, since not everyone can be a winner, making behaviors where oneself is the only benefactor the most logical ones.

“So what”, you say, “There’s anti-social behavior in a game?” I agree, that by itself isn’t worth mentioning. The real bummer is this: Putting in more rules to make things “more social” might even make things worse overall.

Let’s have a look at some of the more commonly encountered “social” behaviors.

The most common case, found in every MMO, might be “Rolling (dice) for everything”, i.e. stating that one needs just about every item there is to be found on any occasion. Either the guy is poor, or dressed in rags because his cool stuff is in the bank, or happens to play a particularly versatile class – he just needs it all.
In real life his friends would hit him over the head for being greedy, or tell him to go play alone in some dark corner, but in the game, it’s just playing by the rules. How could you really blame him for that?
Never mind that those rules (i.e. actually having to roll dice to be allowed to loot) have been put in to make things overall MORE social – most likely to prevent “ninja-looting” (simply taking what you want, without asking the others). Thing is, you would actually just throw a ninja-looter out of the guild, or your friends list, possibly ending the anti-social behavior rather quickly. After all, you can hardly justify ninja-looting with “playing by the rules”. Rolling on everything, though? That’s not nearly bad enough to warrant that. That guy is here to stay.

Then there’s “Scamming”, which is also commonly found in MMOs, e.g. sending someone a gift-wrapped item, putting a high C.O.D. price tag on it even though there’s only crap inside. One might think that adding a postal delivery service to an MMO would make players happy that they don’t have to hand-deliver everything anymore.

Turns out they are, but it also opens the gate to mass scamming. After all, it’s “by the rules”, since you don’t HAVE to accept the delivery. Chances are some of the nicer guys in your guild will have done that as well.

It’s the same thing for auction houses. Somebody puts up an auction for a piece of crap for 50 gold coins instead of 50 copper coins, and some poor guy buys it because gold and copper look somewhat similar? “It’s the buyers fault; he could have paid more attention.”

Yes, he could have, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the guy who put up the auction is behaving quite anti-social, but can comfortably hide behind the rules. With every new safeguard that is put in place, chances are people are actually gaining more freedom to openly act anti-social without having to fear repercussions. The anti-social behavior itself, i.e. the acts it manifests itself in, may become less and less impactful. But the barrier of entry crumbles proportionally, and so rises the number of cases in total.

Even more interesting are situations where there was no bad behavior to start with – only a lack of game rules. In such cases, players tend to make up their own, often surprisingly social, systems, and a designer might want to support them as soon as he witnesses it, e.g. to enable them to spend more time playing the game. Often this can have quite the opposite results of what one might expect. The moment something is an official game rule, it is officially subject to exploitation. That exploitation probably won’t leave much room for social behavior that made it a great experience in the first place.

So what do we learn from all of that?

First and foremost, think long and hard about what mechanics you add to the game in order to regulate or facilitate social behavior.

Unless your target group is among the least “gamey” ones, e.g. hardcore roleplaying fans, your players will very often put the game first, and those other target groups usually don’t need any encouragement to “play nice” anyway – chances are they are enjoying it the rough way.

Second, sometimes less is simply more.