Social Behavior

Yesterday, we were talking about social networks on consoles as yet another item of evidence that persistent, connected social experiences are where it's at. But when it comes to game design, it's cool to see that this trend isn't happening only in this much-buzzed social networking space.

Designers of traditional console games are looking at creative new ways to use multiplayer, too. No longer does "multiplayer" simply mean "some kinda group mode on an FPS where you either help each other or kill each other or play capture the flag," and I think we'll see more evolution and creative thinking about connected play as it becomes the norm, not the rule.

For example, look at Demon's Souls. If you saw my Kotaku feature 'In Praise of Hard Games,' you might remember producer Takeshi Kaiji's story of the inspiration for Demon's Souls' multiplayer -- it came from an experience he had of strangers helping strangers when several cars were stranded in the snow. In Demon's Souls, the multiplayer experience doesn't so much allow people to play together as it does allow them to share the same world, collaborating only when circumstances make it valuable and interesting.

In that way, the multiplayer enhances a solo experience, rather than acts as a separate "mode." And the fact that your interactions with other players are always anonymous -- you'll never know who left you that helpful message, or who that phantom was that helped you beat the boss -- it works with the lonely, ghostly feel of the game rather than clutter it with the presence of too many "others," which is often a turn-off for people who like games to be private experiences (me, me).

Over at Gamasutra, my colleague Christian Nutt recently talked to the producer of Monster Hunter Tri about (among many things) how the game's converging two popular design trends and using them to enhance each other. On one hand, it's becoming more and more fashionable to take elements required for the designer to communicate with the player -- say, HUDs and gauges and numbers -- and minimize them, or better yet, make them a seamless part of the environment, to aid immersion.

RPGs and strategy titles, however, rely heavily on statistical information, making this trend a bit more challenging to implement. With Monster Hunter Tri, the team focused a lot on making the monsters behave in lifelike ways -- that way, players could gather information about the monsters and about the environment through observing behavior and not by reading data screens.

The team also decided not to show monsters' health. It would seem like this would be the sort of concession to realism that would be enormously frustrating for players -- but on the other hand, in a game that relies on its multiplayer components, it was a deliberate choice aimed at encouraging social behavior. When certain information is withheld from the player, it encourages groups to talk among themselves and collaborate, learning the location of enemy weak spots, sharing monster strategies, and things like that.

Demon's Souls allows you to earn your body back if you die, but your "soul form" is weaker than your physical form, which is slightly counter-intuitive -- why make a game harder the more players fail at it? Kaiji has said that choice was intended to encourage players to work together using the phantom system, by which ghosts can aid other players and vice versa.

Withholding information or cranking the challenge level to force players to use multiplayer seems slightly risky from a design standpoint -- until you think about it some. Remember an earlier generation, when half the fun of gaming was all about "secrets"?

How did you learn how to get the whistles in Super Mario Bros. 3? How did you learn which walls were breakable in Symphony of the Night? How did you get infinite lives in Contra? You didn't look it up on the internet back in those days -- you heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. Someone told you. Someone showed you. One day, you had a pal over, and you had the controller in your hand when he told you where you were supposed to stand to get something neat to happen.

You knew about the ins and outs of video game worlds because people told you, and then next time, it'd be your turn to be the cool kid who knew where a hidden room was. The way that you interacted with friends had the ability to enrich your relationship with a game (as I discussed in my July Escapist feature about how our childhood imaginations made simple games more exciting). Gaming also developed an entire mythos of urban legends, "secrets" that were way more rumor than fact (see the "Video Game Lies" wiki!). That was fun, wasn't it?

That's true social gaming, much more interesting than headshotting strangers and calling them names into your microphone. Now that gaming is working together better with a broader definition of "connectivity" -- one that integrates with real-world social behavior and is less game-specific -- hopefully we'll see more examples like these!