Game Decisions

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This weeks reading is about creating MMO games or Massively Multiplayer Online games which are notoriously tricky games to create based off of the fact that they are, as the name suggests, massive and there are many technical issues that come with it.

However there are many examples of games that do not have massive amounts of players online and are still popular. For instance Minecraft relies on small instanced servers and is still very successful. What design lessons can we take from these smaller online games?

Social game design operates within the physical and mental constraints of the human animal and so it plays to understand these constraints. This article online goes much more in depth into these constraints.

Friendship 

A friendship is a social bond between just two people. The most basic level of human-scale game design is about creating relationship bonds. The basics of growing these friendships are Proximity, Similarity, Reciprocity and Disclosure. You can place any two people together in a game and if the criteria is met it is very likely they will form a friendship.

Dunbars Layers

Robin Dunbar believed each individual has a structured distribution of relationship bonds. An individual organises their friendships by strength of their one-to-one bonds. People tend to have a maximum of 150 total friendships, including 50 good friendships, which include 15 best friendships, which, in turn, include 5 intimate friendships. Wikipedia provides much more information on this.

Social Groups

A social group of is a collection of people brought together for a shared task or interest. Groups contain multiple overlapping individual networks. The performance of said groups depends on how the friendship bonds across the entire group are leveraged. There are three dominant perspectives on what makes a group, Social Identity perspective, Self-categorization perspective, Social cohesion perspective.

Considering these constraints it would seem worth it to explore design centred around natural human social scales, if you can build a human-scale game that enables a player to spend quality time with good friends, you’ll likely improve the quality of their life.