Designing Friendship
Tools to growing meaningful friendships in online games
Link to full talk video: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024955/Game-Design-Patterns-for-Building
Daniel Cook Game designer for 20 years
2
Design writings on LostGarden.com
3
Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox, a small game studio.
Mostly as a lead designer or creative director
Co-founder of Spry Fox
Design for Triple Town, Panda Poet, Road Not Taken, Alphabear, Steambirds, Realm of the Mad God, Beartopia, Bunni and Tyrian.
4
I’ve worked on a bunch of small tight evergreen single player games.
5
But then I started getting into designing multiplayer games. It is my current passion.
This is Realm of the Mad God. Flash MMO with millions of players
6
I’ve continued this trend. Here’s Steambirds, our latest MMO. We also recently released Beartopia, a VR MMO
Happiness
I don’t build game because I love games. Games are just a tool.
I build games because I want to bring happiness to the world.
So I went looking for things that improve happiness.
8
A small number of
deep friendships leads to greater happiness in life
One of the biggest drivers of thriving.
Most people only have 5 to 7 close friends
9
Large numbers of
shallow, status-based relationships leads to
increased depression
“Close Friendship Strength and Broader Peer Group Desirability as Differential Predictors of Adult Mental Health”, Narr, Allen, Tan, Loeb
The flip side
This findings are especially true with teens.
10
So...how can online games create meaningful friendships?
11
The Fantasy
We design a many games as if they can use the naive social structures that exist in the real world. Many of our game rules assume the polite face to face interactions you might get in a game with family or friends will be the same for online gaming.
This is a high bandwidth, high trust environment.
12
The Reality
Instead we interact mostly with strangers, mediated through the computer.
This is a low trust, low bandwidth environment.
13
Match-based systems
create throwaway relationships
Which leads to a lot of toxic behavior. In Match-based systems, stranger fight. And when the match ends, you never see one another again. There’s not chance to become friends.
14
Viral systems turn friendship into an dehumanized marketing resource
You click a friend button to earn a currency. A user count ticks up somewhere. Your ‘friend’ is just are a cog in a marketing machine.
15
Restricted or unsafe chats
kills deep relationships
In some games you aren’t allowed to chat. Those other players could be bots for all you know.
In other games, you don’t bother with chat. Since you don’t want hate spewed at you. In either case, you make no friends.
16
Can we do better?
Is there a framework for building better friendships?
There’s a huge opportunity here. Games absolutely build friendships. But they have a lot of really stupid practices that actively hurt friendship formation. How can we design games that are better at building friendships?
How do we build games that help humans be their best possible self?
If only someone had studied this topic…
1950s, Schachter and Festinger. Giants in the field of social psychology.
Broke away from pure behaviorism and started looking at how people interact in groups.
We owe the term Cognitive dissonance to Festinger. Schachter went on to create his two factor theory of emotion.
4200 results on just social proximity (propinquity) and friendship since 2010. Still a broadly used and studied concept.
18
A proven model for friendship formation
19
The Laws of Friendship Formation
Proximity
Similarity
Reciprocity
Disclosure
Here are the 3 factors you need for friendship formation. If you don’t have them in your game, deep friendships don’t form. We’ll also talk about the two accelerants: Similarity, Intensity
We are going to go through each of these. What they are. And examples of how to build them into your game.
20
1. Proximity
Propinquity: Social distance
Repeat, Serendipitous Interactions
YO! Mary!
Hi Jill!
Density: Intentionally design for concurrent density, not physical space.
22
Repeat, Serendipitous Interactions
Mary. Again.
Jill?!
Players need to bump into one another multiple times. Once is not enough.
23
Density
I have no friends
Mary’s here!
It is too crowded!
Density: Intentionally design for concurrent density, not physical space.
MMO’s have a problem with density. Often we say “Let’s make an infinite world” and as a result you are creating very low density. Fixed number of people / a large area = low density.
There are issues with high density as well. Past Dunbar’s number (80 to 150), people don’t have enough mental resources to maintain meaningful relationships. Those extra people start being treated in a disposable fashion.
24
This is a Logistics Challenge
Problem of one sort (Social Psychology) transforms into the problem of another sort (Logistics)
25
Example of logistics thinking
Why not just play with friends?
26
Concurrency Ratios
MMO: 10:1
Online Console Service (like Xbox Live): 25:1
Individual Console game: 150:1
Web game: 250:1
Games have a property known as the concurrency ratio. This is the number of monthly active players divided by the number of current online players.
In the best case scenario, maybe 1/10th of your players are online at any time.
Your Friends Aren’t Online
Concurrency of 25:1 means…
if you have 10 friends…
33% chance a friend is online when you are
This means your friends probably aren’t around.
1- (24/25)^25 = 64%
1- (24/25)^10 = 33%
28
The insight
Friendship rarely transfers to new contexts due to logistics
Design bomb
So you need to build up new friends out of strangers. UGH!
29
Design Tools to
Maximize Proximity
Theory is great, but practical tools will help you get your job done.
30
Basic Tools
Persistent Identity: +Repeat Encounters
Events: +Density
Daily Incentives: +Repeat Encounters
Offline Communities: +Repeat Encounters
Anonymous players
Huge, empty areas
Many gameplay modes
Separating player by skill
Basic Anti-Patterns
32
The Big Anti-Pattern
Matches
Come from board games and sports. Super popular. Super problematic.
Just because everyone builds a game with a certain architecture doesn’t mean it is smart.
33
The Amazing Eternals
“Unfortunately, the game wasn’t attracting players fast enough to support a viable matchmaking player base with the current game design direction, which is the lifeblood of this type of game”
– Digital Extremes
Big killer of games while I was at Microsoft as well.
34
Match Maker
Wait in lobby
Play match
Bored!
Nothing more density killing than a game that is about waiting in the lobby.
Works only with mega hits
High churn due to matchmaking queues
Low repeat interactions
The cost of this hoary old pattern
36
We can design Better
Match-based games are a weak friendship design
37
Pattern: Rooms!
Density Management
Repeat Encounters
Low wait times
Here’s an alternative patterns (I call them Rooms, others calls them Spaces)
Join
in Progress
Leave
in Progress
N slots
in Room
Big benefit: There’s no waiting.
Downside is that there no starting and stopping of a match, so you have to give up a lot of the pacing mechanisms associated with a match
(Consider opt-in goals that operate per person or per small group. One goal completing doesn’t bring the room to a halt. A match is just a room with 1 shared goal)
slither.io
slither.io.
No matchmaking wait.
Time to get into a game including loading the entire game: 6 seconds.
40
Pattern: Active Waiting Rooms
Let’s look at how GuildWars II extends the basic room pattern into a new pattern: Active Waiting Rooms
Room with single player quests
You pop into a room. And then you are prompted to do these little single player side quests. This keeps you busy and entertained even when there aren’t other people around.
42
Public Event
But once you get enough people, a public event occurs. Now you have the option to do a more communal quests with a higher density of players, plus shared goals for the group.
The public events in Destiny 2 have a similar vibe
43
Prevents premature leaving
Maximizes ideal density (+Serendipity)
Event
Summary of that example
Players in matchmaking queues leave
Instead immediately put them in a game room
Keep them occupied with 1 to N player activities
Once critical player count reached, trigger main events
Pattern: Elastic Instancing of Rooms
How do you manage player density?
Hard to see with all the people running around, but in the hub of the game, you can take portals into instances of the main world.
We knew how the concurrent player population, how many people were online. And we knew we wanted to have around 10 to 80 players in each.
If they got over crowded, we could add more.
Hub
Instances
Ideal Gameplay Density
+Serendipity
Social space
+Serendipity
Summary of that example
Players in matchmaking queues leave
Instead immediately put them in a game room
Keep them occupied with 1 to N player activities
Once critical player count reached, trigger main events
# of Rooms
Concurrent Players
Ideal Players per Room
Create number of instanced shards to maximize player density
Concurrent = Number of concurrent players
Density = Desired number of players per instance
Slop = Slop slots. Slop is a set of slots that are usually kept empty but allow for friend invites and other intentional joining of a known room. They lubricate the logistics.
Rooms = Concurrent / (Density + Slop)
Smarty pants question from the crowd
What happens when population shrinks?
49
Pattern: Garbage Collection of Instances
In Realm of the Mad God
Players ‘beat’ instanced servers
Those servers go away
Don’t create new instances
This patterns lets you get rid of extra rooms so you can maintain your ideal density.
Pattern: Voluntary Migration
Guild Wars 2
If server population is low
Bribe players to leave server
51
Pattern: Involuntary Migration
In Guild Wa