We need more video games that are social platforms first, games second

Gamedev here. A different perspective:

1. Social vs goal driven is a false dichotomy: multiplayer games are always both. In any player population you're going to get a mix of players driven by social and creative elements, driven by competition, driven by exploration, etc (cf. Bartle types or Yee player motivation taxonomy).

You can try to encourage some play types over others, but it's really hard to do a game that's social first, just because social by itself doesn't drive retention and acquisition enough: you need something else for players to do to have fun while they're also having fun socializing.

History of gamedev is full of social-first environments, from legions of old MUDs, to Second Life or There, to IMVU, etc. They never reached the same heights as MMO games because it's hard to make a game "sticky" without having the game there.

2. Building a platform first, and then building a game on it, is a quick way to lose all your money. Building a game first and then extending it to a platform is the correct direction, because if you don't have a game, you won't have users, see what works, etc. And until you have users, you don't know what players want from a platform.

3. "Still, it’s clear that we want to come together, not just in Instagram DMs and email threads, but as avatars navigating shared spaces. Somehow." That's just plainly false. Players are completely happy with social interactions without avatars, without 3d space, etc. There are many ways to make games more social, as gamedevs know well.

I get why folk deals desire this atm but honestly I'm sick fed up of multiplayer games, or worse always online games.I miss the days of single player story led games. Yeah they still exist but not as much as they used to and it seems like big publishers want to shove multiplayer/online aspects into every game (see any article about the demise of Bioware).

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon, but when I want social interaction I play boardgames. I play video games for an escape from that.

I'm a game dev with specific interest in the socialization aspect.

The guy that made slack and flickr started each with first trying to create a social-first browser game and failing both times before making these huge successes from their rubble.

I, too, have experience in this way but with more success as we focused on kids. E.g. Club Penguin, Habo Hotel, and Moviestarplanet found their mark for the time they were popular. I imagine Roblox is the modern version of this. Adults don't seem to be as open to socializing with strangers online as children.

There are also MMOs from the past like everquest that were definitely social first.

The best way I've found to create social interaction is to give players goals which rely on other players that are open ended enough for players to socialize about which goals to achieve.

The problem with modern games is that they're too fast paced to rely on other players. Games that require communication and discussing strategy (think D&D style) require that you're not just doing finger DDR. That's a hard sell when games are popularized through streaming and other video. It's a catch-22.

I'm excited about the future of real socializing with games. It's what I spend my days building but there's a part of me that wonders if the world today will allow for it.

Looking back on more than 20 years of playing videogames, in hindsight it is the social moments that stand out vividly. Staying up at a friends house glued to whatever console. Lan parties. And then eventually the migration to networks like steam.

The teamwork. The shared surprise, failure, and success. The bonding that games facilitate with other people. That's the beauty of videogames to me.

I think we need to see a shift in the current paradigm of games. The biggest AAA games are increasingly optimizing for addictiveness, treating players like they are a statistic with a wallet.

I'm starting to entertain the thought that games (the current generation, think fortnite and LOL) are a net negative for society. Sapping time, attention, and interest from people who would otherwise be engaging with reality and their peers in ways that would make their lives richer. And it really pains me to say that, as an avid gamer for many years.

A while back, possibly on HN, there was an article about why it’s generally harder to make friends or find a community after graduation. It outlined some of the requirements for developing strong friendships and community. The ones that stood out to me are:

-shared experiences

-social bonding (knowing the basics of others lives, casual conversation, etc...)

-regular serendipitous interactions with people you know

It seems to me that current online services do a great job with the first element, have mixed results with the 2nd, and fail at the 3rd.

The shared experience is amazing- games transport you to new worlds and give you something to do.

The social bonding aspect varies wildly by game and play context. I haven’t chatted socially playing an FPS online for at least 10 years, but I don’t play with real life friends. I know some guys in clans who do.

The last one, regular serendipitous interaction seems a hard fail. Basically what this means for friendships and community is that you run in to people you know unintentionally. In real life, I finally started feeling a part of my new community when I started to run into people in knew at the grocery store. I’ve started to recognize some user names on HN, which thrills me (including identifying an old college buddy I hadn’t talked to in years.) My gaming experience? I’m tossed into an experience full of 20-100 random people from all over the world, and then 15 minutes later (or at best the next day) it’s the same all over again.

A game looking to increase the social aspect of their wares should look to this third of interaction- repeatedly seeing the same people over and over again. Interestingly, back in the early days of multiplayer the constraints made this better- you had to pick a server to play on one your own, and there was generally only a dozen or so with great latency for your computer. You got to know the user names of people playing there, and technical limitations kept everything human scale (16-32 players at a time, so maybe a couple hundred regular players at most.)

Sure, I agree with the basic premise of the article but we already had that, and it’s more complicated than the article suggests it to be.

What the article wants are more MMOs where your identity is more closely tied with your in-game avatar, akin to a character in Ultima Online that you spent months working on so that you have enough of a personalization applied to bond with it, and also with the people you’re playing with as a result of having spent a long enough period of time doing things with them (quests, raids, RPing events, etc).

Would VR help? Potentially. But the delivery mechanism is for a lot of people excruciating at first - headaches, dizziness, inability to sleep, etc. A normal computer screen usually doesn’t cause these issues so blatantly.

As I have mentioned, I agree with this article. Although I think this is a solved problem that is simply dormant. MMOs shut down quickly because they don’t make money. This economic crisis will only make this more apparent.

A non-insignificant number of people have grown up in early 2000s on MMOs, so they can understand through experience the psychological power of both healing and destruction (mostly through bullying, griefing) that these games hold. But I am not sure if the contemporary world of gamers can step back in time to a more innocent period of the Internet where it was more about communicating with people you’d see every day on forums, MSN/AIM/ICQ and less about random sniping comments on Reddit and Xbox.

I also want to make it apparent to the slightly older HN crowd that we are the last generation of people who had a childhood without internet and always-connected computers, and an adult life being surrounded in technological marvel from them. Our perspective and experience is alien to most gamers today, so any commentary around this subject should keep this in mind.

Shouldn't games be games first and social second? Multiplayer merges gaming/social already. Or is that too much orientated towards actual fun?

I'm wondering just how bad games will get when the focus is social first and gameplay second. Usually the actual fun element starts to fade and they just become clicky/time grinders.

I've seen plenty of games on facebook and their core mechanic seems to be: spread amongst all your friends, punish single players, microtransact as much as possible, collect as much personal data as possible, apply psychological manipulations, profit!

One of my earlier hobbies was automating various facebook games. This meta-gaming was definitely more fun than the actual games themselves. A few of us even set up competitions on the least amount of actual game time spent.

Kind of a side note, but let's be honest here: games are extremely hard, online multiplayer is extremely hard, and social spaces and organization are even way harder than the previous. You can spend a whole life thinking about any of them and you won't reach any comfortable solution / theory. I'm confident that many of us think about all these issues and are interested in making... well, worlds where as much people as possible can have as much fun as possible (and hopefully without developing addictions). So, I don't believe the problem is a lack of will. Minecraft, Fortnite, Animal Crossing, WoW... might be ok, but they leave a lot to be desired. At the end of the day, they still feel very limited and dead. Some people just severely underestimate how hard it is to make lively and diverse worlds, keep them alive and fresh... and have people collaborate (as opposed of killing each other) all at the same time. Barely any game manages to do a single one of those properly for a reasonably broad group of people. Can we do much better? Yeah. Will we do much better? Definitely. Do we already have people around working on "better"? You can be sure of it. But it's so damn hard.

Y'all just need to load up a fresh Realms server in Minecraft. The tweens in my house figured this out weeks ago.

I hesitated to comment since my initial reaction was more emotional than I anticipated. Then I re-read it. I still disagree. But maybe I understand where it seems to be coming from. Games used to be a somewhat solitary experience ( unless your family or friends were nearby, but even then the game was designed for the person playing ). Gaming was looked down upon. I am trying to think who was lower on the totem pole of social acceptance. Hippies?

But today games are not just main stream; they are effectively a big businesses encompassing multiple age groups, some of which include wives playing Candy Crush variation on FB or phone. And that is cool. I think it is stupid and pointless, but my wife thinks XCOM is stupid and pointless. That is ok. We don't have to like the same things.

But someone clearly thinks we should have a 'platform' in place of a 'game'. A place where micro transactions, loot boxes and Altana knows what else yet undiscovered abomination is allowed not only to exist, but to spread. I like games over platforms. Maybe I do not want to be social or pay extra for what should have been included in the original game.

But to be perfectly honest, I would be more upset 10 years ago, when all those things were slowly being rolled out. Today, I still have games I want to eventually play ( and they are waiting in queue for their time -- though I actually have to schedule my game time now ), but if time will come where games are platforms first and games 2nd I will move on to something else.

It feels kinda sad. I lived the online experience ( MMO ) and it has its moments ( there is something about doing something hard as a team ). It is simply not the same as single player experience.

Social aspect has its place, but it should not be usurping actual game position.

Sky is a great example of this as well. The only way to connect with people you know is to scan a QR code, implying you’d need to have been in proximity to link up.

I was doing some research yesterday and was surprised to learn that this is essentially what QAnon is and why they have been successful in reaching beyond your typical conspiracy theory believers. More or less they have created a LARPing community.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/07/qanon-isn...

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/psychology-qanon-why-d...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/201911/...

Something about this just screams out of touch

I'm actually making a game with a heavy emphasis on socialization. One of the big inspirations that I haven't seen mentioned yet is TTT, specifically the TTT mode in Pavlov VR. In that game mode, there are 1) 1-3 traitors who know who the other traitors are and can buy certain weapons 2) a detective who can buy helpful items and a scanner to test people in close proximity 3) innocents who can't buy anything, and are just trying to stay alive

Players need to work together to win, while deciding whom to trust and convincing other players that you're trustworthy. It's been a remarkable way to socialize with people while having a shared goal. I actually find it to be the most intellectually stimulating game that I play, with the possible exception of chess.

This only works for some game types and with that, they become their own social eco-system. To limit and curtail that to the realms of social network first would only see a raft of disparious networks being game developer driven. With respective and their own flavour of what is and what isn't allowed in their social world, laying down the law.

But then the whole social network model is still not perfect, so to enforce an imperfect model and way of interacting upon games would be an api too far for many games and curtail creativity.

Also look at what games people play on social networks - #1 trolling - enough said.

How about more video games that don't have a social platform at all or where it is at least entirely optional, but I would prefer the former because I don't want people wasting time supporting a social platform?

I've been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the past couple of weeks on Stadia. I love just roaming around the countryside, hunting, meeting strangers with missions for me, and all of that. It's been a great distraction and I was sad when I finished the main story, as there are so few of these types of game out there (I've done Skyrim, Fallout, GTA etc)

For social gaming I set up a CS:GO server on a cheap VPS, to play with just friends and family. We chat on Discord while playing, and it's great fun. I don't want to game with strangers, so this fits the bill perfectly.

One of the big changes I've noticed with games is that it's harder to have a conversation during them.

What do I mean? I used to play a lot of Team Fortress 2, twelve people to a team, all talk on, a conversation happening while the game is being played.

Now compare that to what's been popular the last few years.

Overwatch, 6 people a team no all talk

League of Legends, no voice (at least when I played)

PUBG, all talk but sure as hell not for public conversation

Valorant, 5 player teams no all talk

The small team size means that match making works, but it also means there's a lot less wiggle room for casual conversation.

Games like Fortnite are quickly morphing into a more social first style.

Those fail. Battlelog failed, Autolog failed, Second life is a disaster, VR Chats are great for memes. So no, the market has decided we don't need more but better such games.

Among online communities, YouTube comment threads are definitely different than most because people are talking about a shared experience that you can share along with them.

A mini-game element to a social network would have the same effect.

I don't think social networks built around quest games would be as relevant, as they would be biased in favor of intense players and that would be offputting to casual players. It would also be harder to understand what was being talked about.

It seems they forgot Second Life... I'm still trying.

So I guess we need more World of Warcraft then.

If the lockdowns were going to last forever, this might be true. But personally, I think we have enough “online” addictions.

With Burning Man canceled this year, there is talk of online events or experiences that might take place instead. The article specifically talks about the new Fortnite Party Royale island, and the description of it doesn't sound too far off Burning Man in some respects.

There was a unique social quality to public player-run servers at their height. They have not been surpassed as the closest virtual equivalents to bars.

I miss talking to strangers and mild acquaintances more than I thought I would, in that way online and now IRL.

Sounds like the plot of "Halt and Catch Fire"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

Sounds like the project I am working on right now https://box3.codemao.cn/

I am working on one of these https://www.playcrey.com/

World of Warcraft and Runescape had this aspect where you could just be mining or fishing or whatever while chatting with other people.

As I read this, all I could think of was Facebook circa 2009 and Farmville. Be very careful what you wish for.

nah, we need more stuff like doom ethernal, deus ex 1, portal . polished to absolute shine and very good in each regard.