Social Heroes
My thesis has split into two ideas, something which was foreshadowed at the end of my midterm presentation. I mistakenly assumed that one of the ideas would seem obviously better than the other, but that hasn’t happened. Rather, I’m stuck with two ideas which I think explore the ideas I’m working on in very different ways. Interestingly, the place where they overlap (aside from being social games, of course), is identity construction. Allow me to explain.
Superheroes: competitive storytelling for fun and profit
The first game is an iteration on the alliances mechanic which I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. One of the things I learned during play testing was that adding a narrative framework - not necessarily a long involved narrative, but something to help frame the game rules and motivations. (Some people might call this a “theme.” They would be correct, and less pretentious than me, apparently.) Because I’ve been wanting to work on a superhero project for some time now, and had been mulling it over for awhile, I threw it on top of the skeletal mechanic, and found that it fit quite well. Here’s how it would work:
Players would be given (or choose?) a super hero identity and assigned to an initial squad within the game. Each player would be classified according to what their power did (ie, elementals can affect the elements, while healers can, well, heal), as well as the squad they belonged to. Squads would collectively be able to choose if they were good or evil, and players could move between squads (and hence sides of the good/evil axis) as they wished, but could never change their core identity. The real identities of the players would become their secret identities, of course, and they would be able to retcon in an origin story for their super hero identity. (Retconning is important to me as a social construct, particularly in relation to identity construction. The process of establishing how Adam Simon became oh-i-don’t-know Prophecy Boy would be an important element of pulling players into the game.)
The game itself would center around missions, which would be distributed across the game to squads and classifications of players. So sometimes a squad would have to work together, and sometimes several elementals - representing different squads on both sides of the superhero/supervillian divide - would have to work together. And sometimes a player would have to choose if he should support his squad or his class.
I was having trouble determining what the missions would be, and how to give people super powers, and it was seeming more and more like it would be very narratively complex, practically an alternate reality game. Daniel pointed out that I was back to trying to solve the ARG problem - that ARGs mostly don’t have game mechanics, they’re all narrative. And I really can’t focus on fixing ARGs and making a game which reflects social relationships in the mechanic at the same time; it’s tackling too many unsolved problems at once. I might as well work on the game state problem, too. (The game state problem being that big games always have to resort to hacks so that players can tell what each other are doing, something which is implicit in localized games. It occurs to me that our little band of game makers has done a decent job of uncovering and classifying the major problems of our field. Now we just have to fix them.)
So, okay, what happens if I take the collaborative narrative / scavenger hunt / puzzle solving of a traditional ARG and add in the teams and alliances mechanic? That’s kind of interesting, and I like the idea that different groups would be constructing different narratives, rewriting the story to their own advantage. The overarching story would be housed in one place, and bits and pieces would get added as they were discovered, but rather than a universal truth, the public story would represent the interests of the squads and classes that discovered the appropriate narrative artifacts.
This all sounds lovely, but it feels incredibly heavy to me. It would probably require a lot of asset production, on top of writing the narrative, building the technical backend, and recruiting players. It probably doesn’t scale beyond the initial players. And I’d most likely wind up managing players 24/7 while it was running, since there would be no other puppet masters to help. And I’m not sure it would actually get at the problem I’m trying to address: the ability of games to bring our subconscious models of the world to the surface. Problematic.
Achievements: an API for social interactions
The other game was a reaction to those issues, and came out of wanting something very light, as I saw ColorWars revving up to begin. ColorWars is a bit problematic, but the notion of building games on top of APIs is really interesting to me, and I’ve recently been thinking about how Twitter itself is - in its purest form - just an API. The web interface is incidental to many Twitter users. And when you start thinking about APIs as structures which can be applied to things outside of software, interesting ideas begin to emerge. At ETech, Kati London spoke about things which created APIs for social interactions, something which Socialbomb, our proto-thesis, certainly creates. And Tom Coates talked about Fire Eagle existing everywhere the network touches. So what kind of game can exist as an API for social interactions, and exist everywhere the social network touches?
This led me to social achievements, which you could think of as either Xbox achievements for everyday life or an insanely scaled up version of Socialbomb. The idea is that any player would be able to give any other player (and maybe non-players, too) points in different categories. Get the right combination of points in specific categories, and you’d get an achievement, which would become part of your public persona. So, for example, if Daniel is being a big flirt, I could give him 2 flirt points, which could put him squarely on the road to Gigolo, which requires 10 flirt points and 6 spendy points. I’m a bit torn on if these should be constructed more as character levels in an RPG or quests, or some combination of the two. But that can be play tested until it works.
I built a version of this with stickers and note cards (a game designer’s favorite tools), and have sketched out a way it would work over Twitter. There are plusses and minuses to both the physical and the virual versions, and I would build and test different combinations until I hit on a good one. I have some ideas on expanding this idea outside of the give-or-take of pure social interactions, such as earning special points or achievements for getting points in a specific place or social context. And I’m working on an idea for an inventory system, which would allow you to collect physical objects, combine them, and use them on people or places to earn points that way. (The inventory system may also become it’s own game for my game design class…)
The downside of the achievements idea is that it may be too light, despite being a rather pure instantiation of my thesis statement. It doesn’t need narrative, but it does need more player agency - there should be some way for me to gain points besides being granted them by another player. And I don’t especially want my thesis game to just be a Twitter application. I would need to pull out more depth if I was really going to be pleased with it. I think I can do that, but I’m not sure how yet.
A common problem among both ideas? I don’t think they scale. The superhero one would require enough management by me that I think I’d need to stick with a set number of players. And achievements could scale among online communities, but the real-world interactions, which I’m most interested in, would likely never occur amongst players outside of the groups I seeded it in.
Reactions?
Update: In the comments, Scott put forth the idea that “once you had reached a level sufficient to grant an achievement - this would alter your influence on other players,” which is exactly the obvious kind of depth that the social achievements needs. I’m not convinced it needs to be as automatic as he’s positing, which would essentially be a multi-dimensional Socialbomb, but I’m pondering it. And after a sleepless night, I’ve been mulling over the notion of identity being tied to objects, for both ideas.
Update update: In a startling turn of events, I’ve made a decision! More soon (first I’ve got to craft a presentation for tomorrow morning), but the winner is achievements, but with a superhero twist. And I might keep the name Social Heroes, after all…
Mar 30th 2008
It seems to me that the superhero game could work into its narrative that (either at some point during the game or at the beginning), all the superheros and villians lost their powers. So the alliances they start out with based on their powers quickly become irrelevant and they have to rethink them as they try to figure out if and how to recover the powers and how to manage to do the things they used to do now that they’re not so super. What exactly are you imagining as how that particular game works? Are the goals based on interaction with each other or with outside tasks? Are they trying to do the things superheros and villains do, or are they trying to find and cooperate with each other? Will their goals be rescuing kittens from trees, collecting items to build a machine that will solve all their problems, or finding out who the real villain is and stopping them?
I think that parts of the achievements game could scale easily - you just wouldn’t be in control of it in all places. The list of achievements and points could be put online, plus a mechanic for logging the points, right? Then why couldn’t people be playing anywhere? If you, say, started it going with ITP people, couldn’t you also get a group of friends, say, in LA, to do it amongst themselves, too? I think you kind of need to have a loosely defined group that’s likely to meet up already in place to play it, but it seems as if that group could be anywhere. There would probably have to be some points that could only be obtained in live interactions. It seems like the player agency in this game is in choosing to pursue and achieve certain achievements (and possibly not others?). Especially if they can put the same points toward several different goals. What it needs is an incentive to want to achieve each of the achievements. What do they get you? Do they build on and enhance each other? Can you choose between similar achievements (ie your flirt points can make you a gigalo, a politician, or a slut depending on how you choose to combine them with other points)? And perhaps the “spendy points” which are needed for most everything are hard to get or are achieved somehow other than from other game players?
Mar 30th 2008
Hey there - So these are both very interesting and (as you’ve noted), very different ideas. I don’t think you should be worrying about the scaling issue so much in the context of this project but instead on your core idea and the mechanics. As our beloved professor Clay would say - scaling is a rather high class problem to have.
So here are the elements that are compelling to me based upon your write ups -
Superheroes - How cool it would be to be one. It’s that childhood fantasy thing and that I think lends itself nicely to both narrative and mechanic. I also like this retconning concept; and certainly, people always enjoy creating new identities for themselves. I do agree that taking an ARG type approach gets very heavy very fast but perhaps just a few good structural elements would be enough. I’d keep it all in the context of socializing - leaving out any form of puzzle solving and whatnot.
Achievements - This does well what I think we did well with Socialbomb: There is a very low barrier to entry - if you can socialize you can play; and I think the idea of progressively building an identity based off the rewards of the other players is very interesting. I also believe that social games do not necessarily require highly involved narratives. They can exist and influence interactions that are already structured for other purposes (groups at school, drinking in the bar). My instinct is, however, that the level of complexity required does not lend itself very well to the use of stickers or other manual systems. Ideally, if I were to become a gigolo I would want it to happen automatically based on my interactions with flirts and other sultry characters. Unfortunately, this requires some Socialbomb like hardware and a rather lot of work on that end.
So I’m trying to think about how you can combine these. And my first thought was that you could create a game where socializing is about collecting points on your way to becoming a superhero or sorts (eg spending time with lots of flirts might turn you into a super-gigolo). A very simple narrative would then allow you to effect something based on your superpower. It just need the very tiniest bit of sauce to make things compelling.
Which brings me to my thesis and thoughts about tools for social networking that involve setting interaction and grouping ‘modes’ on a device in order to understand social purpose and bond. If we adjust this slightly - I could see a device where you configure your current ‘mode’ as something like ‘flirt’ or ‘drunk’ or ‘excited’ or ‘frantic’ etc etc that would lead to a bidirectional influence on yourself and the other players. The devices would essentially tick up points toward an achievement based on an aggregate of the states of the group your in, and once you had reached a level sufficient to grant an achievement - this would alter your influence on other players.
Of course, this all sounds rather ambitious. And I am not sure how to best pare things down. The achievement idea just strikes me as requiring some pcompery to control game state and the Superheroes (by itself) does seem like a full on ARG requiring all the trappings and production of such. Perhaps there is still an opportunity to leverage our Socialbomb API.
In fact, the hardware and code you’d need would look an awful lot like what I’m working on now. Hmmmm. Not sure how a collaboration would work without changing both of our ideas significantly but I’m always open to possibilities, and happy to discuss in detail. Anyway, may the force be with you.