Shared Resources

I'm always thinking about new mechanics to bond my players to each other. Most games rely on simple "safety in numbers" mechanics - if your cleric dies, you can't be healed. But that leads to very shallow relationships. "Working" relationships. Sure, players can exceed that, but it's kind of erratic when you have to fight the system.

Those aren't really what I like to see, so I try to use mechanics to make different kinds of relationships. Here are some of them.

Someone Else Narrates for You. I originally saw this method in a game that duplicates that Japanese movie about a high school class being shipped off to a deserted island and forced to kill each other. The idea is that you have to specify a best friend and a rival. If you succeed at something, your best friend narrates what happens. If you fail at something, your rival narrates what happens.

When I first saw it, I was rather taken with the idea, but in playtests it didn't work so well. With five players, a certain person ended up on every single other player's sheet as either rival or friend. They spent a considerable amount of time narrating. Awkward. Also, the position of "rival" is an unenviable one, and if done correctly, makes the players hate each other.

While there's something cool about this mechanic, I don't think it can be used like this.

Unique Card Requirements. In a Jedi game I ran, the Force was represented by cards - each player had a "hand" representing their access to the Force in any given location. Players were allowed to trade cards. At the beginning, trading cards was only done to "supercharge" a given Jedi: "Alex needs to stop the droid army! Everyone, give him all your face cards!" (There was also a noble sacrifice mechanic for Jedi who used more Force than they were supposed to, or used Force in a particular way.)

However, as the game went on, each character began to get specific card combinations that they could use more efficiently. One person would get double points if all the cards they played were hearts. Another needed straits, another needed face cards, another was good with deuces...

A chunk of our table time was therefore dedicated to swapping Force cards. While it sounds like this would break immersion, it really didn't. Perhaps because it made sense for Jedi to spend quite a bit of time communing with each other, perhaps just because of the peculiarities of our player base. But what ended up happening is that they all started to rely on each other far more than usually happens - far more than in other Jedi games I've run.

All Fall Down. I've seen a mechanic like this in many games, although I've never used it myself. Basically, the players have a shared set of... something. As they do cool stuff, they have to reduce that resource. At some point - exactly when is unknown - the resource will fall, and the player will die.

An example is using a Jenga tower: every time you need to succeed, you need to remove a piece. If it falls, you die. Another example is a simple card deck: draw two cards, put one back on top of the deck. If you keep a joker, you die.

These mechanics are interesting and work very well, so long as you're doing a relatively short narrative arc - one or two sessions. There's something about the randomness inherent in the system that makes it unsuitable for longer arcs, which generally have a stronger emotional investment on the player's part.

Source Control. In this kind of system, in order to do something, a player must use another character somehow. Generally, this is some kind of karmic link or psychic power source or something. However, it drains the second character somewhat.

This kind of system generally produces very political gameplay, because resources are limited and negotiation is king. When it actually harms you to help someone, players generally start bartering rather than simply being friends.

However, if the mechanic doesn't rely on limited resources, it can produce very interesting, deep relationships. For example, in order to use magic, you need to draw on your relationship to another character by partaking of that relationship. IE, friends have to banter, rivals have to try to out do each other, masters have to be obeyed, etc. If each kind of relationship can also only provide specific kinds of fuels, you can have characters who are actively searching for rivals, or masters, or lovers, or whatever. It's still very political, but in a very... narrativistic way, rather than a statistical way.

...

Can you think of any other methods of shared resources which get players to work together? Have you ever run a game with anything like this?

Actually, I don't think I have any GMs who read this blog. It's mostly computer gamers. I should probably stop posting this RP stuff.

Crafting Constraints

Today I attended the Harvard Interactive Media Group's panel. It was excellent, and this is the first such meeting I have found better than "painful", so this is a ten from a guy who gives out a lot of ones and twos. I have a lot to think about: it was rich in ideas.

But one of the things I want to talk about that I don't have to do a lot of research on first is constraints.

This is going to be painfully ivory tower.

It's fairly well known that creativity flourishes under constraints. Tell someone they can write five pages on anything, they're likely to be stymied. Tell them to write five pages on cloning, or write five pages that use the first twenty words of the dictionary, and they have a ball. People that work well without constraints typically work well because they are very good at assigning themselves constraints. "Write five pages about anything? Well, I have strong feelings about cloning... and wouldn't it be cool to use the first twenty words of the dictionary?"

In a very real sense, expression is mostly about applying constraints. If you squint, you can see that the real purpose of a piece of art is to offer up a set of constraints to the viewer, such that they are impelled to think in a certain way - think, feel, and witness within specific constraints. Well-chosen constraints will allow the viewer to have a rich but directed experience.

This experience varies across culture because how constraints interact in our minds is guided by experience, which... um... varies across culture. So in one culture a specific set of constraints might produce a very rich experience, while in another it might not resonate at all. Even internally to a culture: romance movies don't resonate well with me because the constraints it applies do not present me with interesting challenges and opportunities to think about. "Choppertunities"... glaarrgh... I used the word...

Movies simply offer constraints that change over time. They not only offer a constraint space that makes people think in specific ways, but also change the constraints to make them think in different ways at different times. Also, the changing constraints form a constraint all their own, which might be thought of as the genre. The constraints governing the changing of constraints are, in fact, well-defined cultural structures - defined over decades of symbiosis with a given set of viewers.

Games (interactive media in general) offer constraints that not only change over time, but also interactively create new constraints. How your spaceship can move interacts with how you choose to move it, and this creates a new set of constraints on how your spaceship can move (IE, dodging into an open area gives you "looser" constraints). Similarly, in an RPG, how you advance your character determines your skill set. While the progression is constrained in specific ways, the way you move within those constraints changes the constraints of how you can interact with the game. Whether to learn a fireball or heavy armor: it literally forms the constraints of the game.

So, what do we get when we think of games as interactive constraint generators?

Moreover, what do we get when we think of how we can get more user interactivity/content by either creating constraints to cause it... or creating constraints as a result of it? Friends lists are the obvious example.

Thoughts? Lack of thoughts?

Boolean Choices

Last post I mentioned that boolean choices are bad. I also mentioned that all the drama engines I'd seen were doomed - they all use boolean choices. Patrick came around and said, "hey, they all use floats and stuff!"

The choices are boolean.

The most obvious example would be in a game like Knights of the Old Republic, where your choices are universally "do good", "be a spaz", and "walk away". These are not choices which give you any kind of expressive freedom.

More complex systems are growing more common. Patrick's full of examples: Storytron and Facade are two big ones. "They use floats!"

They represent an internal state with floats. But the choices the player can make are, in fact, brutally binary. This is a result of that plague on recent drama thinking: "verb thinking". Verb thinking is better than "noun thinking". Of course, getting stabbed in the shoulder is better than being shot in the face, too. It's like the difference between having the flu and having rabies. It was a good idea when it came out, but it's a dead end: it doesn't go anywhere. Now it just wastes time.

"Punch" is a verb. You punch someone and, like magic, the game runs a quick simulation. Relationship - 40 and anger + 10 or some such. It's boolean: a punch either happens, or it doesn't. "Punch" is either true or false.

Yah, have any of you ever been in a fight? There's about a million different kinds of punch, and they carry different meanings. If I punch you as hard as I can in the face, that means I'm so angry I'm willing to break my knuckles so long as you suffer. If I stick to body blows, it means I'm not willing to let this degenerate. If I throw some elbows or knees in, it means something else, and so on and so forth.

Every verb is like this. Kiss. Touch. Yell. Barter. Blackmail. Give gift. Play parcheesi. Dance in the rain. They are not true or false. It is not a question of whether you dance in the rain, but rather how you dance in the rain.

Crawford would have you use modifiers on your verbs in order to give them some kind of spin. "Punch very hard" or "punch calmly" or some such crap. Booleans stacked on booleans. Relationship - 10 * modifier. Useless. Bandaids on gunshot wounds.

Games are intricate beasts because they allow you to determine exactly how, between thousands of nearly identical choices, you want to play. In a manner so fluid you don't even realize you're doing it. These are skill challenges.

In an FPS: strafe left? Strafe right? Go straight for the health? Jump for the high ground? Here or a foot to the left? Can you dodge the rocket? Nothing's preventing you except your own lack of skill.

An RPG is shiftier, because an RPG really does boil down to hundreds of booleans: buy a sword or armor? Equip your healer or your mage? Go back to town to rest, or push on? Get that fireball spell when you level up, or that damage bonus? But these stack - a hundred boolean decisions stacked and all simultaneously in play, all the time.

Who is equipped with what. Who is at what levels. Whose stats are what. Whose condition is what. There are three or four viable strategies for each person every round, for a total of maybe a dozen viable options, all affected by the hundreds of choices you've made so far - and that's round to round. Outside of combat, there are hundreds of possible options for combat-affecting decisions. And, of course, you have to balance offense, defense, magic, healing, items, pathfinding through dungeons, lock-picking, whatever else is in the game: it's not just all frontal assault. Your equipment, stats, and other choices "communicate" on many axes, many levels.

And me? I still think the standard RPG has a pretty weak gameplay model. The choices are too transparently clumsy - hey look, a sword of kill shit + 5! That nobody bothers to export to the other town that only has pointy sticks! Like that's not made to layer on top of the hundreds of other long-term boolean choices I've made.

A drama engine? Bah-ha-ha! You get your choice between maybe two viable strategies any given round, and you have maybe three or four things that affect the outcome, tops.

Booleans. If we're talking in terms of bits, a drama engine's "complexity" isn't even one byte. An RPG? Maybe 32-bit? Depending on the RPG? A game like Quake or Valkyrie Profile or Final Fantasy Tactics, where timing, exact position, and complex recombination matter? Maybe 128-bit.

So, yeah, drama engines. Not enough expressive power using the methods they are using.

Forget your decision trees! Your choices communicate on more than one axis, so your choices should be able to move freely on those axes! Throw down the shackles of "verb thinking" and think with "sliding axis" thinking! Don't "dance"! Waltz! Shimmy! Do the twist! The robot! The hand jive! The tango. It takes more than two to tango, ha!

Gluing Agency to Content

Two posts, one day, you can tell it's the weekend.

Jeff's essay on agency has congealed a few of my own theories into more workable concepts.

One of the things I've been wrestling with is rules. Rules are pretty shabby. Games aren't rules, never have been, and I've been saying it for months. Rules are a kind of stand-in or crutch for another person: good in their place, but certainly not the central "gameness" of a game.

No, as is now very clear, rules are red tape that glues agency to content.

People can also be that glue.

Anyhow, I like that phrase so much, I'm adopting it!

Game or Tool?

This is a slowly aging question: when does a game turn into a tool? We're pretty sure that Half Life II is a game and Garry's Mod is a tool. But where do you draw the line? Is SecondLife a game? A tool? A game when you play it one way and a tool when you play it another? "Creating content" doesn't make it a tool: you're creating content in WoW when you equip a new piece of armor or make a healing potion.

There are lots of places you could draw the line. One interesting one is longevity of content: if the system creates long-term content, it's a tool. If it doesn't, it's not. In the WoW example, what armor you wear is pretty much a short term thing. Even a squad of ten dancing orcs isn't long-term, because eventually it'll break up. But if you can record ten dancing orcs, it is suddenly long-term content...

The only reason I think about these things is because the dichotomy has got to be a false one. There has got to be a method of creating content which is a game, or game which is a method of creating content.

There are tons of tools out there that try to help you create better stuff. In many ways, the march of human progress is measured in improved tools. But as tools get more advanced, they also get more complex to use. I don't mean the amount of skill you need increases, simply that the complexity of the interface increases. A piece of paper and a pencil is something that anyone can understand (although it requires great skill to do great things with). ZBrush is something that even some 3D specialists can't get the hang of - it has roughly ten million buttons and options.

I think this is the true dichotomy between "game" and "tool". Tools have been getting more and more complex interfaces, whereas games haven't. Even the most absurdly complex games aren't actually very complex to use, and games with more complex interfaces have smaller audiences.

Unfortunately, there is an inverse relationship between time to content and complexity of interface. You can write down and draw every single thing that a game can do in a giant tome, like the dark god of all illustrated "choose your own adventure" books. But not only will that actually take longer than creating it with a complex-interface software tool, it also creates a more fragmented, irritating result. This is because simple tools are really only suitable for small amounts of content: you can write a beautiful story on paper, but you can't realistically write a story arc which reacts to the player's preferences using such a simple tool.

But! But!

But Red vs. Blue.

There is a path, if you can tell what I'm getting at. A path where a lot of high-quality content is already there, and a simpler interface is suitable for making it go in specific, fairly simple ways.

Ah, simple stuff, right? Machinima's old news. We already knew that.

What if we take it a step further?

What if we create a bunch of simple tools, each one of which does only a small part of the final system. You already see this to some extent, with specialized tools for 3D modeling, texturing, and animation - even specific tools for modeling people vs structures vs equipment vs clothing...

Then, each tool can access the content created in the other tools. Sort of like choosing a character and set before you start filming your machinima.

Pretty much already exists? Not really at this level, because often they simply say "go make a model in your favorite modeling software", which isn't really an "easy" tool, is it? Plus, they aren't really interactive with other tools in the same way I'm positing. But we're drifting in this direction. We might see further drift in this direction with the advent of Spore, with its three or four interactive simple tools.

But steps into the future are never really enough, because by the time you reach the future, everything is different. Abstraction is critical, or you'll end up with tools that simply can't accomplish what people want to accomplish with them, or at least not easily.

So what about a system for designing simple toolkits and specifying how they interact with each other? To take it a step further, if each of these simple toolkits was a "game" that, as you played it, created content suitable for the other toolkits?

Blaaarrgh!

I Coulda Been a Contenda

Huff, puff, trying to get back into theorizin' shape.

This here's an essay on Science Fiction. More specifically, all the fun and wacky variants! It's a list of all the facets I could think of. See if you see anything you like.

I suggest not trying to read it through. It's a bit repetitive. Instead, skip anything that bores you. I, uh, should warn you. It's pretty detailed, and definitely only a first draft.

Science Fiction facets

Choosing Choices

Three.

Well, okay, there's no magic number. But I like the number three. That's how many choices I try to give whenever players hit a non-skill-based moment.

There's a lot of these moments in a lot of different games. Choosing whether to take a left or a right in a dungeon. Choosing whether to save someone or rob them. Choosing whether to buy a sword or a bow. Choosing what building to build, what party members to take, and so on.

What I mean by "non-skill-based" is kind of iffy. After all, there's skill in equipping your party or building a building or even choosing left from right. But it's not the primary play skill. Whereas the primary play skill needs to be deep and diverse, secondary choices are usually less about skill and more about personal preferences. If there is a best choice, then why offer the others?

These choices are very important to a player's sense of agency - his sense that his choices affect the game world. The going idea is that a player should be able to do as many different things as he wants. This leads to games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can run around and go just about anywhere whenever you want. Of course, this has side effects that you may not like.

First: Because you are offering such a wide ability to choose, you are essentially turning that facet of the game into a primary play skill. In GTA, knowing where things were and how to navigate the map was an important play skill, unlike in most other games, where navigating the map is simply a way to get a breather between today's plot event and tomorrow's plot event.

Second: For various reasons, navigating space/plot in a freeform manner generally results in an extremely shallow set of results. The typical response to this is to seed the map with random fun stuff that has little to do with long-term play. A nifty weapon, a fun comment, a shiny car. These things reward players who decide to participate in the shallow (but broad) play you give them without actually requiring complex long-term play changes.

Third: Has high development cost.

(See? Three choices of poison. I like three.)

Taking the "cheap" way out, and giving them only a few choices, is generally a more effective way to actually give players agency. A good example of this is a game where you can choose out of three approaches to any given problem (typically, stealth, fighting, and magic/ranged/social). In this case, even though the end results are essentially the same (beat the level), the ability to choose an approach gives the player a lot of agency.

Of course, the "cheap" way comes with its share of problems.

First: Insufficient options. A lot of times, the choices you offer will simply not appeal to a player. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Trying to provide choices to please everyone is a bit like trying to lift a couch with a toothpick. Even if you're incredibly skilled, the method is simply not suitable.

By making options "in-game" rather than "breaking the fourth wall", you can reduce this problem hugely. For example, offering weapons in-game and letting the player choose which weapon he wants is much better than asking him whether he wants to be stealthy or brutal.

Second: "Gilded Cage" issues. When a player is made to choose from too few artificial choices or artificially restricted in some way, it really steals away the agency and can be very irritating. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Every drawback is especially true of dialogue trees. :P

Some games try to provide a huge number of options while either making them all equate to the same few choices or while making the vast majority of the options so obviously unappetizing that nobody would choose them. This works pretty well for live games like tabletops where there are no such things as saves or second play-throughs, especially because if they do choose some wacky thing, you can always make stuff up. But this is difficult to do with a computer game, since players will often try everything and quickly figure out that you're offering meaningless choices.

You can reduce this, to some extent, by using the same "in-game" techniques explained above.

Third: Exponential growth. Given two or three distinct choices that have different results, you quickly run into The Branching Tree of Doom. There are effectively three ways to keep this from getting ridiculous. You can have choices have numerical rather than plot results. You can have choices lead to different paths that always go to the same endpoint. And/or you can have some kind of algorithm for determining outcomes based on any given choice, which minimizes scripting by adding ridiculous amounts of engine programming.

Anyhow... that's basically it.

Ahhh... I said I was going to link it up to social games and MMORPGs but, you know what? I'll have to do it in a different essay. This one's already too long.

LEGO Theory!

LEGO Theory!

(This is longer than I intended. :P )

A player plays a game. As the player experiences the game, the software builds a complex structure of ideas (gameplay, graphics, story, etc) which interlock and support each other. The tighter and smoother these interlocks are, the tighter the game holds together. If you know what a memeplex is, it's essentially that. Regardless as to whether you know what that is, think of this as legos. Each moment of play is another tiny lego, building a giant final structure.

"Yeah, duh, games build on themselves. Who cares?"

Well, at a very basic level, how good the ending of your game is depends largely on how well it "caps" the structure you've created. Some endings which should be good endings flake out because the legos don't support them. Some endings which should be trite and bad end up quite touching because the underlying structure is built specifically to need only a little bit of additional work before the structure completes.

But how to think about your endings is only the tiniest piece of this puzzle. After all, this same basic idea applies to comics and movies and books and classes and business deals and blogs and...

In a single-player game, you'll see that a game builds its structure up much like a TV series might, although using pieces that no TV series has access to (like play).

But in multiplayer games, things can get very complex.

Tabletops

Imagine a tabletop RPG. Six players and a GM. The GM is simulating the world for the players. He is placing pieces and creating a structure. However, any given event usually focuses on one or two characters: this round, Anna the Angel and Bob the Barbarian got hit by a squad of storm troopers. But Cinnabun the Ranger and Drokmok the Dancer don't care as much about that.

Essentially, the GM is trying to build a complicated, tight lego structure for each player, but when he puts a piece down, he can't tell how long it's going to be! It's different for each player depending on how much they care about the event that just happened.

There are three ways to deal with this: loose structures, corrective applications, and self-construction. I bet you've never heard of at least one of these concepts before:

Loose structures are the path most GMs take unconsciously. They quickly learn to create lots of "slack" in their game structure so that players can do various things and feel various ways without making the whole game collapse like a Jenga stack. This does end up creating a structure that looks more like lace than a sturdy wall, but it works okay. It's not very efficient at creating a good game, however.

Corrective applications are not quite as common. When a GM does this, he gives another lego piece to players which don't have enough support. Essentially, he "fills in the holes". Like building a lego structure, you should fill the holes before you cap them. This usually means that the GM does one-on-one mini-sessions with the players who feel left out, or makes sure that roughly the same number of interesting things happen to every character in every session. This isn't the best way to do it, but doing it better would require an astonishing amount of micromanagement.

The third path is the path of self-construction. This is a pretty rare path for "mid-level" GMs to take. A lot of early GMs take it and a lot of advanced ones do, too... but it's too common for a GM to hold on to his game too tightly to allow for this kind of freedom.

In self-construction, the GM sets up parts of buildings and then lets the players try to put them together in any reasonable way they can think of. Players usually cooperate to glue them together into structures of incredible density. The GM is no longer really a Game Master, but a Game Guide: he gives the players new pieces if he thinks they're running out of bits to glue together, and occasionally kicks down someone's building.

The downside to this method is that each player will end up with a different building, meaning that as the game progresses it gets harder and harder to give everyone pieces that fit into their own unique structure. This can be controlled somewhat by an experienced GM, but always happens. It's especially bad for endings: typically, these games require half a dozen individual endings wrapped up into one giant blob.

"So I should think about using a loosely defined progression, keeping all my players happy, and letting them do their own thing from time to time? Gee, thanks, I would have never thought of that on my own!"

In my opinion, each of those methods could have a book written about them, but for now I don't have time to further extrapolate because I'm jumping into...

MMORPG

MMORPGs are kind of the ultimate example of how to do all three of these things. MMORPGs allow players to get as involved as they like with whatever they like whenever they feel the need. It lets them go to whichever piece of structure they want and claim it into their personal story. It doesn't hold them to a specific plot.

Actually, MMORPGs fall short in two ways. First, they don't really allow players to self-construct much. The players can't really build their own buildings very large, save through guild mechanics. There are other ways I would consider superior.

The second way MMORPGs fall short is that they don't have very much in the way of a Game Master (or Guide, or whatever). Essentially, there's nobody who sees a particular player and goes, "they really need this particular piece of building." This lack of guidance means that players get pieces of structures, all right, but none of these pieces have much chance of ever fitting together.

Is there a solution? Well, maybe you could record the "shape" of each piece of play, and then keep updating a player's profile to see what kind of shape might go nicely. It would, however, be quite rough. Worse, it would probably be hard to correctly guess how much time the player wanted to spend this week.

Barrier to Entry

Most games strive very, very hard to lower the barrier to entry. Generally they do this by having an introduction which forces any player who joins to go through a tutorial. This lets the game build a lego foundation so that the player, when he starts receiving pieces of building, has something meaningful to attach them to.

For one player games, this is pretty simple since everyone starts from scratch. For MMORPGs it's actually quite hard, but they spend a lot of time and money on it and it works out.

Now, how about for a tabletop?

Ever tried to bring a new player into a tabletop only to realize that he doesn't fit? This is especially true of my games, since I build rather complex structures and I build them vertical. So a player comes in and I'm giving people pieces that fit into this one weirdly-shaped little node that they all share fifty stories off the floor. The new player gets this thing and just stares at it. It can't even stand up on its own, let alone be used as a foundation for further play.

Chances are, your games are a little less... vertical. But you probably suffer the same problem.

The obvious solution is to have an introductory session with just them and maybe one or two other guys, so you can build a foundation that makes these pieces work out okay. These kinds of sessions work well, so long as you build fast and strong rather than trying to rebuild the same building the other players have. The new player will still occasionally get pieces that don't fit, but if you're running with the player-construction method, everyone occasionally gets pieces that don't fit.

The problem with an introductory session is that it takes hours and hours. If you run games like I do, it is fundamentally impossible to have that much time. If I spent even an hour with everyone who would join Boogaloo if I only laid them a foundation, I would have to spend all my free time doing just that. Yikes!

For my grander schemes, such as an on-line version, this is an even more ridiculous idea.

But... what if...

Assistant GMs

Some GMs have assistant GMs. I generally don't, because it's impossible to tell them enough to keep them up to date as to which players need what kinds of weird structure pieces. Of course, this means that I have a player maximum (functionally about five players, despite the fact that my games generally have two or three times that). There's only so much attention I can spend.

The place you're most likely to see AGMs is in large LARPs, where they are charged with mostly just making sure people know the rules and arbitrating when the rules don't apply.

But, really, is there any reason to have them be AGMs? Can't players arbitrate and teach just as well? Sure, the player may be biased, but once word spreads as to which players are bad at it, they won't get asked to do it any more.

Can't this be used to create a kind of "pryamid scheme" for teaching new players? Instead of the GM spending time, a player spends time. This lets the game scale functionally infinitely.

At that point, the real question is how to track so many player's needs... or to automate their ability to create pieces that fit those needs.

Bleah. Sorry, this was long.

Swords and Smiles

Melee combat is very complex, but you wouldn't guess that from most RPGs. The melee combat has been abstracted into a simpler form where we use high-level commands to control the combat, and the low-level bits aren't even simulated. Of course, once you've abstracted something like that, it's easy to include fantastical elements like magic, and re-weight things so that various approaches are balanced in game when they aren't in real life. The abstraction simplifies a lot, so we add in a lot of stuff to prop up the play - plot, highly varied monsters, an equipment-buy cycle...

Social play is very complex... but is it more complex than melee combat? Is it more complex than torque and positioning and sharpness and how the body reacts to injury? I lean towards "no", but I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I understand that social play isn't a zero-sum game like melee combat, but...

Here are the questions I'd like to figure out how to answer:

1) Can social play be abstracted out into something very similar to the play in some existing genre? Not "can we replace swords with smiles?", but "can we use a turn-based dynamic like an RPG?"

2) With the advent of "deeper" interfaces (such as the Wii), melee combat (and other situational) simulations are likely to get less abstracted. Will this new wave of "realistic" models provide us with a better foundation for abstracting social play?

3) Does anyone care?

Deep Social Gameplay?

I explain why social gameplay is a hard problem, and some various ways people have tried to solve it. It's not long, and it's not written in acad-speak! It is kinda steeped in deep game design stuff, but other than that, it should be pretty accessable.

Tell me what you think.

Social Gameplay.