The Novelty of Community

Massive multiplayer online games have been a lucrative industry trend for years, but Tarn [Adams] disdains M.M.O.’s. To him, they replace the deep pleasures of imaginative game design with the novelty of community and are invariably oriented toward mass, lowest-common-denominator appeal.

—Jonah Weiner, “Where Do Dwarf-Eating Carp Come From?”, the New York Times

I like to think, maybe naively, that my friends from the world of creator-owned, self-published indie tabletop RPGs are proud of (or otherwise pleased with) the fact that I’ve gotten a job in digital games. A friend of mine likes to say that there are two types of indie RPG designers: the ones who wish they were in video games, and the ones who wish they were in a band. I don’t know if that’s descriptive of the people, but it is descriptive of the culture, for better or worse. I clearly wanted to be in digital, and thankfully, here I am. That said, there’s one question I get asked fairly often:

Why social games?

Especially with the largely punk-rock, do-it-for-the-love, fuck-The-Man ethos that pervades indie RPGs, social games seem like an odd choice: the genre appears as hyper-commercialized transactional gameplay, light on story and innovation, aimed at an unsophisticated market new to the idea of video games. In reality, I think that social games are in their infancy in terms of what they ARE and what they can do, but ultimately, they might be the thing that bridges the gap between what we do at the gaming table and what we do at the computer.

When World of Warcraft was first released, was there a single weekly RPG group in the country that didn’t lose someone at the table to Azeroth? There had been adventure games before, and MMOs before, but never had the quality of graphics, game structure and IP intersected in a way that was this accessible to a major audience. Tabletop players everywhere were quick to point out that WoW was not a real substitute for the shared imaginative space of an extended roleplaying campaign, but that didn’t always matter; no one claimed that the positive feedback from WoW was identical to what you got rolling dice with friends, but it was close enough to serve as an acceptable substitute.

I touched on this a bit in a two part guest post I did for my dear friends over at Failbetter Games; the idea of a narrative physics engine— something that does not model as precisely as real life, but gets close enough to provide a similar sort of satisfaction. That was talking specifically about story, which is something I find incredibly important and will no doubt blog your ear off about at a later date. Socially, though, it provided a similar sort of simulation.

On one end of the social spectrum, you’ve got tabletop RPGs, which are the ultimate social game. Often, playing involves sharing a meal and swapping stories about your week; more than that, though, it involves sitting down and sharing an imaginative space and continuing narrative with people whose company you enjoy. It allows us to see sides of our friends we’d never imagine: though I hope it never comes up in real life, thanks to RPGs I know that my friend Vincent can plan a jailbreak on relatively short notice and that Julia can think of great places to hide weaponry where cops would never look. On the other end of the spectrum, you have CityVille: App pages with seas of  ADD ME and a consistent stream of requests: Your Ex-Boyfriend Wants You To Be Captain Of His Navy, Your Mom Built A Bakery Next To Your Prison, That Guy From High School Would Like You To Send Him Some Pineapples.  (I hesitate to call XBox Live “social gaming,” as it’s more the equivalent of an aural fourchan; screaming the word PENIS down a marble hall just to see how many times it echoes.)

The good stuff, as you might imagine, is in the middle.

Minecraft does social brilliantly— multiplayer servers that require ops to self-select participants, creating the same sort of community as a guild or gaming group without the open-to-the-public concerns of getting griefed. This does make Minecraft a difficult place to meet like-minded individuals, however; like sitting around a game table, you’ve got to know someone to get the invitation.

Failbetter’s Echo Bazaar is much less mercenary in their social transactions than your average Facebook game.  It makes valiant efforts to imbue the “social requests” of a mostly-asynchronous, deliberately lonesome game with more narrative significance— but Echo Bazaar still feels fundamentally like a one-player game where you get to send up signal flares: “I’m here too!”

What I’m trying to say is this: I believe in satisfying and intricate game design, but I also believe that the design of a game is infinitely more satisfying to an average human’s needs if the design requires multiple people interacting in order to work correctly. For as long as I’ve gamed at a table, I’ve heard the same argument: “Digital games will never kill tabletop games because they don’t give you the feeling of doing or making something important with your friends.” With games like WoW and Minecraft, those arguments have obsolesced— and that’s left me looking for something more respectful of my time than MMOs, more structured than Minecraft, and yeah, with stories and gameplay that appeals to me as an almost-thirty-year-old mom of two. Shit. That sounds a lot like social games, doesn’t it?

They’re not quite what I’m looking for— not yet. But that’s part of what’s so incredibly exciting about being in this space. I’m not in this because I’m so impressed by what Farmville did; I’m in it because I can’t wait to see where it’s going. And maybe I can drag my D&D group there along with me.

2 Responses to “The Novelty of Community”

1. Julia says:

   November 13, 2011 at 7:35 pm

   I am happy that you moved into an arena that you love and am proud of you, Elizabeth. Moreover, you shouldn’t let other people’s opinions of what you love to do affect you to the point that you hope your friends are proud of you. That piece of your post made me a little sad. I, for one, am proud of you because you found something that you loved to do and you found a way to do it. You know that Rumi quote, “Let the beauty of what you love be what you do”? Well now you do. It should be a guiding principle in more people’s lives, and I am happy that for at least one of my friends it is.

   All told, I’m not a much of a fan of online social games. I play Echo Bazaar with decreasing frequency, but I enjoy our Carcasonne game, and have about five Words with Friends games going at the moment. I like these games because I can spend less than 10 minutes per day on them combined, which is about how much time I want to give any non-essential online activity. I don’t use them for the social part. I like them because I like Scrabble, I like the mobile device version of Carcasonne better than the board game, and I think Echo Bazaar is just fun. As for the latter, I don’t even use the social piece any more. No one wants me to send them 100 rats anymore, it seems. I might be the only person in my gamer circle who has never played Minecraft and probably never will. This is pretty much in line with my online social activity in general. I tolerate the artifice of it. G+, Twitter, and Facebook deserve less time than I give them, and I’m working on giving them less of my time. I just don’t like socializing online. It’s mostly a necessary albeit convenient evil, made even more necessary because of my work.

   That said, I am excited to see where you (and maybe Ben, too) go with your social gaming design endeavors, and to that end, I’m curious to see what becomes of social games. I think you have a perspective on their function that should be used in more social game design.

   I really miss table top gaming with you!

   Reply
   • Elizabeth says:

     November 16, 2011 at 10:02 am

     I miss gaming with you too!

     I think social games have a particular importance to me because, since I was in third grade on the Prodigy BBS, I’ve been making friends online. As much as I used that opening quote to mock the guy from Dwarf Fortress, the truth of the matter is that the communities I’ve built with people I’ve met online have lasted longer and been more fulfilling to me than the communities I’ve been a part of by location and chance. At this point you’re probably about to make a strenuous objection about Western MA— but that’s actually precisely the kind of community I’m talking about. Shreyas and I picked the Pioneer Valley because of the relationships we forged with you and Josh and Casey and everyone else online. There was something weird but intensely gratifying about moving to the Bay Area and having a ready-made group of friends cobbled together from various Internet communities I’ve been a part of over the years— and knowing I could do the same in almost any major city.

     But as I get older, and busier, it’s harder to make the time for those Internet relationships that have meaning to me— so I need some way of keeping in touch that feels meaningful, but doesn’t take a lot of time. Like Carcassonne! Or social games. This is part of why I see huge parallels between what indie games are doing— moving away from the weekly eight-hour D&D sessions in years-long campaigns— and what social games are doing in relation to forms like the MMO.

     Reply