Trio Blog: Social Interactions in Game Dynamics

This week, we chose to write our blog piece as a team, with our 6 hands. We started working hard on our Social Semantic Web project which aims to create a crowdsourced social platform for writing. In a few words, on this platform, people will contribute to stories by adding new paragraphs that can be democratically elected through a voting system. We wanted to try the concept as a team for this blog piece.

Today we want to talk to you about social interactions in game dynamics. This topic has been inspired by another course the three of us are following, Interaction Design, in which we have seen some major game design concepts.

Cooperative, competitive and collaborative games

The typology for games can be endless but we can try to group most of the games we know into two big categories: cooperative and competitive games.

Mainly, the difference between those two types of games can be told by the winning situation: if only one person wins, it is probably a competitive game, if several persons win, then it is probably a cooperative game. But there’s also a type of game that mixes those two aspects. The common area of the Venn diagram showing the two types of games would be: collaborative games.

Collaborative games are games where people need to work together while also being in competition. Basically, the winning / losing situation can be summed up like this: either one wins, or everybody lose. As long as the winner is not defined, everybody has a good reason to collaborate to the game because they all want to win, but at the same time, only one can win. Usually, what happens in those kinds of games is that the players need to support each other, if one is weak, he increases the chances of losing for everybody, and only the end will tell who is the real winner. But after all, we can say they all are winners as long as they don’t all loose.

So how is this related to the social web? Well, the social platforms are some kind of a game area where people might see influence or popularity as an end. In this analogy, it is clear that if one wants to get to a higher rank in the social hierarchy of the platform, he needs the help of the other users. It can be by motivating their participation (RT, favorites), or by connecting to the people who will help them get higher. But he also needs to work with them and thus, help them also get to a higher rank.

Testing social ties

Games often are a real challenge for the social bonds between players. While cooperative and collaborative games might strengthen those bonds, competitive games can much more easily weaken them. There are famous examples for this and even games created because of this infamous fact: The game of monopoly for example often tends to frustrate half of the players at halftime. This frustration is particularly straining for the players because they are well aware of their losing role, but also have very very small chances of getting back on track or even just leaving the game. They are expected to sit through, selling houses and taking mortgages on their streets. From Germany comes the game “Mensch, ärger dich nicht” — world famous by its German name, often called “Ludo” in English. It directly aims at this problem and by its name already teases the players to not get frustrated by the main principle of the game: Because of pure dice luck players can get the chance to throw other players back many rounds of progress.

This is part of play. This is even one of the main things motivating people to play — a challenge composed by skill and luck. But some games do balance this challenge to avoid frustration and to bring frustration to the other players better than others. Monopoly, while being one of the world wide most commonly played games, strangely is a very bad example of this and a real test for even the strongest social ties.

Strong and weak ties in games

Inspiring from the last week topic, which is about weak ties, I’d like to discuss about people’s interaction with each other during games in the case when both know each other closely or when they do not know each other very well. The former case indicates strong ties in this setting and the latter one shows weak ties. Do people tend to compete with each other in case of weak ties or strong ties or co-operate when they have strong ties? In other words, how having different kind of ties with other players in the game have influence on the dynamic of the game?

According to the article we read last week, the author says that people think that strong ties have greater motivation to be of assistance and are typically more easily available. With this claim, I’d say that it is more likely that people cooperate with each other if they have strong ties since they think others in the game will help them to win, and so they should also help and be of supporter. In the article, he also claims that weak ties bring more opportunities as well as access to information for people who have weak ties. When I think about this claim, I’d say people can clearly talk and discuss about the game if they have weak ties but this relationship has borders that do not exceeds the point that cooperation comes in. Considering the strong ties and weak ties, what do you think how it affects the dynamics of the game?

This blog piece has been written by 6-hands: @WhiteFangs (me), @ahoereth and @nezSSW