ds1935’s blog

Main idea:
Game rules and mechanics and social context are interdependent in an emergent fashion.

Background:
Project Description:
Moving Parts is a hybrid physical/digital, two-player pinball game designed to elicit different social interactions between players.

General Backround:
Wow, games are pretty damn social!
Even though people tend to think video games are solitary, they’re actually pretty damn social too!

Not only are games social, but people do all sorts of wacky things to shape games to meet their needs. And then, in the other direction, games themselves do wacky things to shape peoples’ behavior. We’re pretty familiar with this dynamic in non-digital games, but it turns out that digital games are also surprisingly malleable.

Digital games are becoming even more social. So it’s becoming increasingly relevant to suss out how digital games and social interactions shape each other—both to make better games, and to make better social interactions.

Personal Background:
At the beginning of the semester, I wanted to make a game that created a specific social dynamic.

In previous work at ITP, many of my projects ended up creating interesting performance and interpersonal situations, and I wanted to extend that work by more explicitly addressing the ways that computational systems shape people’s relationships with each other and/or with those computational systems.

I had a few ideas of what might lead to interesting social experiences as mediated through a digital game, based on what had led to interesting results in previous work. Tension between physicality and virtual. Underlying structure that could support interesting social relationships (i.e. prisoners dilemma). A game where the social experience was not the same as the game experience (i.e., a non-narrative game or a game where the game narrative was not the same as the narrative of the social interchange between the players). I wanted to look small—at exchanges between 2 people—to thoroughly avoid a game that drew complexity from the complexity of social networks.

When I started getting into the nuts and bolts of game design, I found that the system had a life of its own. The game itself only had certain avenues available for communicating with and between players—I might create a structure that the players would never see. (My earliest iterations were unintelligible precisely because of this.) Also, the game’s context powerfully shaped when and how people played the game, how they learned the game, how they interacted around the game, and what versions of the game were more and less successful.

As I became more familiar with the particular demands of this particular system and continued to iterate the game design, I started using the game to ask more open-ended questions. I had a fairly solid underlying system, and the game was situated in a specific context. Rather than trying to create a specific social dynamic, I started playing with rule sets to see how they could and could not shape player interactions. How did the affordances and limitations of this game interact with the affordances and limitations of its context to create a social situation? What aspects were amenable to manipulation via game design? What elements of the whole process might be applied in a more general framework?

Project Description
Hybrid physica/video two-player digital pinball
Constant elements: physical design, basic game structure, social context
Variable elements: rules about balls, bumpers, flippers, and score

Results
The affordances and limitations of the game
(already written) pinball’s limited vocabulary

The affordance and limitations of the social context
(already written) ITP is crazy!

What emerged?
–how did the players shape the game?
Casual game! Played in passing, for 5 minutes or so.
I had to make the game intelligible without reference to instructions or score, rewarding even when the player didn’t know the rules, and make the rules learnable in 1-2 play sessions. I guess this means that they shaped my approach to the game design, which then shaped the game itself…

The game was played by a number of people in a shared social context, and there was strong uniformity in feeling about the game and how people played the game, even as those other elements varied. Always people played in a friendly, conversational fashion. A couple of gamers kept track of the different versions, were invested in the ongoing variation, and reported different experiences in relation to different rule sets (and gave really helpful feedback!). Most non-games reported different experiences based on whether or not a given version was intelligible and provided a coherent player experience, but at similar levels of coherence, regardless of the content of in-game interactions, they reported similar takeaway values—fun, friendly.

–how did the game shape the players?
In different versions
This game basically has one avenue for social exchange, and through that one social exchange I was able to create a lot of variation in the degree of interaction and the in-game meaning of that interaction. Collaborative play, synchronized play, “coopetition.” These differences led to differences in arousal, investment in outcome, feeling of independence or interconnectedness.

I couldn’t make people feel differently about the other player, but I could make people feel to different degrees if they were playing with the other player or by themselves. Generally, greater feelings of interconnectedness and control led to more positive feelings, no matter the content of the interaction (i.e., both helping or hindering the other player, and doing so when intended rather than by accident, seemed to lead to similar feelings of general happy fellowship. This makes sense, really.)

overall
Shaped players’ expectations
(passer-by: “you’re playing alone?”)
(matt: “maybe this is because the earlier version was cooperative, but I keep feeling like this version just isn’t quite fully competitive. Maybe if you hadn’t started with that cooperative version, I wouldn’t feel this way.”
(even though we agreed that continuing to play the game should be a reward for winning, actually once one player lost, the game became much less interesting (this probably goes somewhere else))

Conclusions
Does any of this generalize?
I feel pretty confident that player experience is an emergent system affected by both the game and the context. This seems like a lot of work to get to something that’s pretty obvious.
In slightly more detail, there’s something in there about the ways that specific games and specific contexts lead to some railroads and some open-endedness. In this game, the context seemed to railroad player experience and the game created many railroad tracks but was, in some very specific areas, open to a good deal of variation.

Which characteristics create railroads, and which create openness to variation? Can they be considered separately, or are they necessarily interdependent?
And I haven’t even begun to think about how narrative fits into the picture!

Directions for the Future
Immediate-term—continue playing with different rule sets in this game. As I feel more confident with this game’s vocabulary, I am figuring out ways to play with the game—more ‘words,’ to kill the metaphor. Turning on and off walls, multiball. It’s all about the ball exchange, limited attention, and casual. Learn this game more fully.

Longer-term—answer all my other questions! Further research—both traditional research and directed game design—into connections between game systems and social interactions. Look into how these issues on a 2-player level do and don’t relate to similar questions on a massively multiplayer level. Develop a more nuance understanding of and vocabulary for the different kinds of social interactions that arise in and around digital games. Achieve world peace by building magic toys.

These are some of the questions I’ve been thinking about this semester.

I can’t write about them all! Plus, my thesis doesn’t directly address most of them.

1. How do people communicate with each other through in-game actions? How does that change with digital games?

2. What are good game mechanics for ARGs? What game mechanics create interesting social possibilities and also scale?

3. How are social context, game rules, and player experience connected?

4. In a video game, how is a computer like a person? (in a non-Turing test kind of way…)

5. What affordances are there in video games for people to drastically alter player experience?

6. What makes a game mechanic particularly open to being reshaped by players’ desires and needs?

7. What taxonomies are helpful for analyzing game rules, social dynamics, and player experience?

8. What are good models for developing a more fine-grained understanding of social interactions within games–i.e., better than ‘cooperative versus competitive’?

A graph of points exchange in Adam Simon’s thesis game, Social Heroes. Lines are color coded to indicate who gave the points, and connect to the recipient of the points. Thicker line width == more points given.

I am failing to document all sorts of other aspect of my thesis, but look!

A button I turned on a lathe!