Building Social Bonds: Notes on Reality Is Broken, Part III

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In the previous post we have introduced the first three of the 7 traits that enable a game to “fix” the boring reality, as mentioned in the book Reality Is Broken¹. We are gonna look at the next one trait: the ability of a game to build better social bonds. As social behaviour is a rich subject in game design, I think a post should be dedicated to this trait alone to make things clear.

As usual, it should be reminded that the theories presented are drawn loosely from a psychological perspective. These statements, no matter how well constructed in their own field, cannot explain game or gamification as an entirety. The traits mentioned should be approached as a checklist during your project instead of a cookbook.

It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? … Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? … they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all.

— R. Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Game excels reality in building social bonds* through its efficiency and asynchronism. Prosocial attitude is cultivated during this process, in a safe and costless trial-by-error manner.

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• It should be noted that the “social bond” mentioned here are not to be confused with Hirschi’s definition. Our definition refers more to the social relationship between two individuals in a society instead of a person’s involvement in a society, as defined by Hirschi. I refrain from calling this connection “social relationship” because the term indicates less social cohesion in the connection. A bond can better describe the high viscosity between individuals formed by social relationships.

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Efficiency in a social game means the enhanced speed and quality of social bond formation. In reality, these bonds are constructed inefficiently by the interaction of limited social roles and status, and solidified through rarely shared experience. In forming social bonds, a game environment could provide quality through free social roles and speed with realtime experience.

Free Social Roles: for Quality

By “free” we mean that a player doesn’t need any other resources than his own effort to obtain the desired social role in a game. In reality, social roles often need other resources to achieve. To name a few:

• An institutional recognition is needed to become a teacher.
• An actual offspring is needed to become a parent.
• A citizenship under certain government is needed to become a soldier.
• A golden spoon is (often) needed in a class-stagnant society to become an upper class member.
• A nice appearance is (sadly but still commonly) needed to become popular.

As we can see, some of these resources are hard to attain, all of them require a long-term dedication. Instead of focusing on the prosocial behaviours one can do in that social role, such as teaching, protecting or nurturing, getting to the role itself becomes the final objective for many.

As we have explored in the previous post, an autotelic system avoids exotelic rewards to achieve happiness. An ideal world should emphasise value on people’s self-driven efforts instead of external desires. The harsh reality, however, often yields exotelic systems as more popular choices. As a result, many can’t feel satisfied/happy in real life.

Game lifts the price placed on these social roles. A player could attain any social role as long as he works towards it. He could become a teacher by gaining experience in a game and sharing it with others (virtually in every multiplayer game). He could be an “upper class” in a virtual city with enough money earned (GTA5 online). He could even form a family with another person by nurturing a virtual pet/baby together (The Sims). All of these require nothing more than a dedication to play the role. Game allows its players to find true happiness by offering these “free social roles”. They will form social bonds quickly in the purest forms, and often without the tedious, difficult detours to obtain irrelevant extra resources.

There are many psychology models we can employ when it comes to designing the social roles in game. These models illustrate how functioning as specific social roles provides rewards. We can enhance our game mechanisms to implement these models. In Reality Is Broken, the author mentions the following for examples:

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Naches: The pride and joy obtained when we teach/encourage someone to perform certain tasks. If the student succeeds, we will obtain the joy. However, if someone succeeds without following our guidance, we could be subject to jealousy or hatred. Sometimes the game mechanism “hides” contact to the latter event to avoid the negative reactions.

Mockery Vaccine: Mockery often happens when we defeat friends in game or when they play awkwardly. Instead of actually causing pain by derision, mockery between bonding individuals serves as a “social vaccine”. We imbue slight pain on others by mocking them. For the person mocking, it shows the ability of him to hurt the opponent, and that he would never use it. This sends a more sincere message of friendship than acting harmless. For the person being mocked, he is willingly putting himself in a position subject to attack. He shows power in this way (“I’m not afraid of attacks.”). More importantly, he helps the mocking person to share an equal social status/power. That’s why some leaders and parents often allow themselves to be mocked. Guiding mockery in game, such as designing awkward failures and hilarious traps, could help people perform mockery and “get vaccinated” for strong social bonds.

Play Alone Together: Although we live in society, we feel more relaxed when we are close to companionship, but not interacting with it actively. This state of mind is called ambient sociability. In game, a similar mechanism called “play alone together” enables people to achieve this peripheral social awareness. A public virtual environment is provided for all players to access, but everyone is on his own independent task. I think the following quote from Jeff Vandermeer can illustrate this phenomenon more clearly:

This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a ‘pristine wilderness.’ They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.

— J. Vandermeer, Authority

Being in an ambient society helps us find significance in our actions while also keeping the maximal freedom.

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Many other systems exist to help us understand and design a player’s social roles. The three models given provide an introduction to them. Generally, I think a handy research method is to categorise the desired model in different dimensions:

• Is the desired role formal (occupation etc. ) or informal (family, friend etc.)?
• Is the desired role personal (perceived only by one party) or interpersonal (perceived by multiple parties)?
• What social environment is needed for this role to exist?
• What’s the most necessary social behaviour of the desired role? Why is this behaviour necessary in a society?
• What extra resources are needed to assume this role in reality? How can we turn them into efforts?

Answering these questions yield insights on how to integrate a certain social role into our game. Finally, one thing to note is that the addition of social roles in a game must be “organic”: the added role must be able to react with other game elements, such as story, rules, challenges and feedbacks. In fact, a constant mutual influence among these elements is needed to keep a game’s harmony during design.

Realtime Experience: for Speed

Shared experience is one of the most correlated factors in forming social bonds. The exposure length and extent in shared experience determines the strength of social bonds formed.² As a side note, shared experience’s effect on social bonds is not relevant to its positivity as long as it’s far from neutral. A negative shared experience, such as war, bonds participants as deeply as a positive one to the same extent.³

What I want to discuss here is not the extent of shared experience offered by game, but the ease of this offer. Game is a device of creating realtime experience, and this feature enables it to deliver any shared experience consistently, while the same content is only rarely obtained in reality.

Let’s think about adventures. We would hardly explore ancient ruins and hunt treasures in our daily lives, yet we always dream of doing such activities. In Uncharted, any player could experience this dream by simply pushing some buttons. Even better, in Don’t Starve we could explore a bizarre world together with our friends, creating a survival story together.

In reality, the difficulty of obtaining similar shared experience is sky-high. Who is willing to let go of all the safety and comfort, and try to explore a desert of hardship? We can form closest bonds under these circumstances, but usually no one wants to go through them because the cost is very high in safety, effort or time.

Game enables us to obtain this experience in a realtime manner, while also offering a safe and comfortable environment. Therefore, game is much quicker in building social bonds than reality. It could summon strong shared experience immediately.

Asynchronism refers to the concept in game socialisation where social interactions can proceed without immediate responses between participants. This means that during a game, communication gets blended with the game flow. A player waits for others’ “moves” now instead of messages. Eventually, playing a game becomes a promise for communication that avoids the impatience in waiting for response.

In Reality Is Broken, a Facebook social game, Words With Friends, is given as an example of asynchronous socialisation. In this game two players try to compete in completing words against each other. Instead of the usual social interactions in reality, such as a date or hangout, a round in Words With Friends can take up to days to finish. A player can make a move whenever he likes to proceed, talking whenever he wants. This asynchronous pace creates a much longer interaction between individuals than having dinner for two hours. It also assures each player of the other one’s presence in his life by promising the next move.

The key to achieve social asynchronism in a game lies in the “offline mechanism”. By this I’m referring to the design thinking that targets how a player is affected by a game after signing off. We could consider these potential questions:

• What social members would prompt the player to initiate another game? Are they in real-life or social networks?
• What’s the social promise that he wants to make by initiating another game (community, friendship, responsibility etc.)?
• What offline information is kept online for this player? What is his online presence?
• What’s the purpose of leaving this offline information? How does a player create and maintain it?

I believe these questions are fundamental in integrating asynchronous socialisation. Once we have clear answers for each, we would then be able to draw a schema for implementing our asynchronism.

Recap

We have discussed the efficiency and asynchronism inherent in social games. A detailed explanation is given for each of the features, along with suggestions on how to integrate them into a game. In its simplest form, the social aspect of a game enables players to actively engage and form their unique society. In many cases, this society is what keeps many game worlds thriving. Hopefully you have gained some new insights from this post. Stay tuned and thanks for reading.