Game Decisions

Game Decisions


For this weeks reading task, I read an article called 'Social Design Practices for Human-Scale Online Games' by Daniel Cook. 

 -What we can borrow from social psychology: Social game design operates within the physical and mental constraints of the human animal, so it pays to understand these constraints and build them into our designs.

 -An overview of friendship formation:  Friendship formation requires 4 key ingredients:

  1.Proximity: Being close to someone will encourage many interactions.


 2.Similarity: Having something in common with someone will make it more likely that they will become friends

3.Reciprocity: Players must engage with each other in order to share social norms.

4.Disclosure: At high level of friendships, there must be safety and trust between them.

You can take any two players, put them together in matches for hundreds of hours, and if the above criteria are not met, they are unlikely to become friends.

-Dunbar’s Layers and the constraints they place on social systems design: An individual organises their friendships by strength of their one-to-one bonds. They have close friends they turn to when in need of help and more casual friends, who they interact with less frequently.
Visualisation of Dunbar’s Layers. Each block represents time to build one relationship in that layer.
Image Source:https://lostgardenhome.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/99875-image1.png



-Social group and the constraints they also introduce: Social groups are a set of people who are considered a group. This tends to be a group of a lot or a small amount of people that are your close friends and you would trust with helping you and being there for you.
There are three perspectives of what makes a group:
-Social Identity Perspective: “I feel like I’m part of a group.”
-Self-categorisation perspective:“I feel like you are part of a group.”
-Social Cohesion perspective:“We act according to shared social norms.”
Some groups can go through problems such as falling outs over little thing which could lead to the group dividing or a person not having the same goals as everyone else.


Best practices: 
Build games for smaller cohorts: The base activities should target small, collaborative groups. Large groups of close friends are rare or, in many cases, mathematically impossible.
Cluster players into persistent, high-density cohorts: So they have repeat interactions with the same players. The more reciprocation loops that are completed, the stronger the friendships. Big, empty spaces are not a positive feature.
Encourage high-concurrency events or asynchronous activities:Logistics favour players being around to interact with their friends. Having friends playing the same game doesn’t matter if you never see them.
Aim for long-term engagement: Build a game where players are engaged for hundreds of hours, so they have enough time to build deeper friendships.
Attract existing friends: If possible, you should attract your own existing friends. This will give you a few players as your friends will help you out.

 Overall, I really liked this article as it gave me a depth on friendships in the gaming world.

 Heres a link to the article:https://lostgarden.home.blog/2018/12/29/social-design-practices-for-human-scale-online-games/

An image showing the friendships of gaming.
Image Source:https://www.nyoooz.com/features/technology/is-social-gaming-the-next-big-thing-in-india.html/715/








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