— Will Wright

Survival horror has never been this good :) Sorry Dead Space. Dismemberment was perfected 11 years before your time.

I’ve been thinking more about the concept of video games as social activities, or “social digital toys” as a WOMP! playtester described it (if you’re new to the conversation, check out a couple related posts here and here). One way we might be able to make video games more social is if we greatly reduce the game’s awareness of and involvement in the player’s actions. That’s a weird thing to say (and I’m probably saying it less clearly than I could), but let’s look at an example outside of video games to see what this could mean.

The stock market features only two core interactions: buying and selling shares. There’s a magic black box that adjusts the prices of shares depending on how many are being bought and sold, but it’s an antisocial magic black box. It doesn’t like or need to talk to people. It simply enjoys crunching numbers in isolation. So we have a very simple system that affords a very simple set of inputs and produces a very simple set of outputs. But the social activity surrounding the stock market is huge. People make careers out of talking about the stock market. Engaging with the stock market is infinitely more complex and rewarding than the system itself would suggest because it’s a social activity. Furthermore, the system places no constraints on how “players” can interact with each other. It has no awareness of or involvement in the social activity that occurs other than when a person buys or sells shares.

HoloH’s rules were born out of this idea. There’s only one interaction that the game is aware of (when the non-playing team approves of the playing team’s performance by pushing the “A” button on the controller). But despite the highly limited interaction players had with the game itself, players had fun because they interacted with each other.

Perhaps the real idea here is to remove unnecessary structure and constraints from games, and to design opportunities for freeform play. Avoid hardcoding all of your rules into the game; make your rules flexible and allow players to take ownership over them (like the “Free Parking” space in Monopoly). Create “social digital toys.” Find fun in other people.

Let’s talk about this at GDC next week :)

What do you say we leave for California?
If we drive all night we can make it by the morning,
And no one has to know if we decide to go.
What do you say we leave for California?

Don’t make fun of me for loving Metro Station.

— Ubisoft’s narrative designer Patrick Redding

— A shining example of Heavy Rain’s quality writing