Brain Dump

Let this serve as a warning: today’s post is high-theory, and application is unlikely to be deeply discussed.

Last week I talked about tabletop game design as interface design.  I suggested that social interfaces are inherenly flexible because they do not require specialized knowledge to hack (or rather, that socialized people already have that knowledge).  This was contrasted with video games, which are more rigid and require less widely available resources (both knowledge and tools) to hack, thus making them less flexible.

Today I am going to examine things from a slightly different angle.  Today I am going to discuss why all multiplayer games are socially mediated.  Yes, this turns out to be pretty much a ‘no duh’ issue.  Games involving social interaction are socially mediated?  Shocking!

Still, maybe there is something to learn here.

Remember last week how I was talking about the fact that no game is able to completely convey all of the necessary interface to a social group and that groups are thus required to fill in the gaps on their own?  There is a similar phenomenon going on with non-roleplaying games of all sorts, only it is not as visible.  Speicifically, this filling-in process is harder to notice because there is an entire class of things that must be filled in, and thus the class itself is often overlooked.

That class of things is what I am calling (here, for the first time) ‘utlimate rewards’.  Many roleplaying games have a ‘what is roleplaying’ section in them somewhere (though this section is not always labeled as such).  This is the section of the game that explains at least some of the final rewards you get from play: social interaction, telling cool stories, making hard choices.  This is the section that tells you how play rewards you.

Compare this with most board and video games.  Their reward structures are primarily internal (you score points in Galaga, or you do damage to your opponent’s life-guage in Street Fighter 2).  There is not meta-consideration here.  There is no explanation of why you should care about points or life-guages.

I do not think that many people are going to suggest that scoring lots of points is fun in and of itself, while I do think that plenty of people are willing to buy into the idea that telling stories or interacting socially are.

So, while roleplaying games tell you what sort of ultimate fun the activity is supposed to provide, other forms of games rarely do.  Of course, for most games it is rather easy to analyze them and see that they are clearly designed to have social competition plugged into them.  That is what high scores are all about, after all: being the best.

But social competition is a high level bit of social interface, and it does not have to be employed.  That is, the reason for playing these games can be hacked (since that reason is not integrated into the interface).  Maybe you play a game like Galaga cooperatively, switching off between levels to see how well you can do together, for instance.

This suggests that the fixed interface elements are simply tools employed within a social interface structure.  Perhaps Galaga is especially well-suited for use in competative interfaces, but it is simply a tool that can be creatively employed in other sorts of interfaces too.

I could continue rambling about this for a while, and at some point it is possible that I will discuss smallest-unit interface elements, but I am pretty sure that you have heard enough for now.

Tags: Dense-post, Theory

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 01:54 and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.