Social Engineering in Games
Engineering for Good (ie. Not Bad)
Written By: Chris Barney.
Video and Board Game Designer, Lecturer at Northeastern University.
Originally published at Perspectives in Game Design.

So… there is a lot of ‘bad’ social engineering in games these days. Particularly in free to play games where it’s necessary to wring your players for every cent you can in order to make your game profitable enough to continue your development studio… or in order to meet your publisher’s quarterly goals. From pinch levels to optimal reward schedules some developers have made a science of it. But that’s not really what this post is about.
I want to talk about ‘the good kind’ of social engineering. No really, the kind where you are setting your players up to behave in a way that will make their experience of your game better. Maybe there is no difference and this is just an issue of my personal moral compass, but in any case I want to look at the ways that I have manipulated my players in a couple of my games.
The first instance is from my game Fall of the Last City which I have discussed at length in previous posts. I had initially used a timer to move play along quickly, 15 seconds a turn. This heavy handed technique had the drawback of stressing the players out and lowering the fun level of the game. I switched to synchronous turns but ran into the common situation of one or more players becoming distracted during the turn causing turns to last a minute or more. I tried having players raise their hands when they were done with their turn but that just felt silly to the players and they more or less ignored that ‘rule’. Thinking about my problem more deeply I decided that I was trying to do more than move the turns along quickly. I was also trying to make the players feel powerful and aggressive and to put pressure on slower players to move more quickly in a way that fostered tension between the players rather than frustration with the game. Given that the theme of the game is the violent overthrow of an oppressive government I modified the hand raising mechanic to read ‘Raise your fist in defiance of the City!’ and mentioned how stressful it is to have all the players who have finished staring at you with their fists raised. That worked much better. Now the drive to move quickly was coming from the players and following the rule was seen as a way to put pressure on your opponents in the game.
The second example comes from a hour long live action game I wrote and ran a number of times called Days End. The game takes place in a single room where a group of survivors are taking refuge on the eve of the zombie apocalypse. I wanted to foster a sense of suspicion and distrust between the players that would make it more difficult for them to solve the simple puzzle of how to escape from the room. I wrote things into their back stories but from years of experience I knew they would ignore these things as they saw fit when they realized they needed to work together. So I wanted a mechanic that would drive them apart, but I also wanted to keep the game mechanics lite so that they would be able to focus on the immersive experience of the game. To achieve this effect I gave a number of the players sheets of different colored stickers and instructed them to apply one of their stickers to another player whenever various conditions were met. The conditions were things like talking to someone for more than a minute or being touched by someone. I also instructed the players to ignore the stickers on other players. Given the setting of the game the players naturally assumed that the stickers represented counters toward becoming infected with the zombie plague. The players of course were unable to follow the instruction to ignore the stickers and as they spread through the group so did distrust and suspicion.
The third example comes from a party game I created for my fortieth birthday. The theme of the party was (don’t judge me) “Friendship is Magic: The Gathering” which was of course a My Little Pony / Magic: The Gathering mashup. I wanted to encourage behaviors that would create a dynamic party and that would get everyone attending involved in interacting and having fun. So I created name tags for all the attendees in the style of Magic cards but with custom made My Little Pony artwork from an online generator. I gave each pony, er attendee, a special power that was fun for them to use, like the ability to make someone fetch you a drink, or dance with you. But using that power made them ‘tap’ or turn their tag sideways. I then gave them a second power that would make the party better for everyone else, things like talking to someone standing alone or picking up trash from a room. Those powers ‘untapped’ their name tag. In this way players were encouraged to both have fun and make sure everyone else was having a good time. I created cards with abilities tailored to the personalities of all the players such that both their selfish and altruistic abilities were aspects of their normal personalities. I did not point out that I was highlighting positive and negative aspects of who they were… but the subtext was there and was thematically consistent with the cartoon.
Please comment with other instances of social engineering in games that you have used or encountered!
