In this 2018 GDC session, Spry Fox‘s Daniel Cook explains how to keep human beings from being treated as interchangeable, disposable, or abusable when designing multiplayer games.
If you’re developing, or thinking about developing a multiplayer game, this is a great talk to better understand the challenges of designing multiplayer interactions that result in more engagement and player satisfaction.
Daniel talks about the potentially negative social effects of multiplayer implementations, the effects of proximity, propinquity, serendipity, and density on people’s relationships, the logistics of forming new friendships in games out of strangers.
He covers basics like persistent identities (and repeat encounters), events (and their density), daily incentives, and offline communities as well as anti-patterns such as anonymous players, empty spaces, too many gameplay modes, and separation of players by skill. He also talks about the challenges of matches and matchmaking, which often necessitate large amounts of concurrent players to be viable, and the issue of matchmaking queue churn, resulting in low repeat interactions. The talk also covers the topic of similarities; tribalism, nationalism, their negative effects, and how to work with similarities in a positive context through fictional places and cultures. Daniel speaks to reciprocity, how it levels up relationships by building trust for more meaningful and deeper interactions, and the challenges of building trust, which is easily destroyed by cheating, scamming, or even premature disclosure which then kills relationship leveling.
I think the whole talk is fantastic, but the friendship levels of solitary play, parallel play, ambient/accidental coop, soft coop, and hard coop, are something any multiplayer game designer should think about because designing games around those different levels can have far-reaching effects and give games the proper appeal they need to grow and thrive.
The low trust, medium trust, and high trust Venn diagrams of increasingly more discrete player skills can also be found on Raph Koster’s website in his post about The Trust Spectrum. It’s a great read. The topics apply to all games, but it makes me appreciate Deep Rock Galactic even more for its well-thought-out design.
I find it funny that Daniel calls out retrofitting a social architecture as hard because I define architecture fundamentally as “that which is difficult to change later.” The context or nature of the architecture is usually less important.
Godot Engine 4 has a bug (#50824) that causes particle jitter when the game is paused. It does look quite distracting. The Bug in Action This is a proof-of-concept wave shooter running in Godot Engine 4.0.2. Pausing the game was initially just a simple process_mode toggle. But as shown in the video clip above, there …
This release contains the new Godot editor integrations. It offers an Item Library bottom panel that makes it easier to manage your inventory item types, and an inspector plugin that lets you edit items in a GGItemCollection. This also reduces the need for manually creating GGItemData resources, which simplifies item management at design time significantly. …
For some reason, my Godot game would no longer launch on the Steam Deck. I could hear it running as if it were running in the background, but the screen kept showing the Steam Deck’s UI. Since it’s all Linux I figured it should be possible to just drop to the command line and launch …
Hugo-Dz created Super Godot Galaxy: https://github.com/Hugo-Dz/super-godot-galaxy, which he announced in this Reddit post. It uses the 3D Starter Kit from Kenney and shows how to achieve the effect of applying gravity toward the center of a small spherical planet.
Design Patterns for Building Friendships
In this 2018 GDC session, Spry Fox‘s Daniel Cook explains how to keep human beings from being treated as interchangeable, disposable, or abusable when designing multiplayer games.
If you’re developing, or thinking about developing a multiplayer game, this is a great talk to better understand the challenges of designing multiplayer interactions that result in more engagement and player satisfaction.
Daniel talks about the potentially negative social effects of multiplayer implementations, the effects of proximity, propinquity, serendipity, and density on people’s relationships, the logistics of forming new friendships in games out of strangers.
He covers basics like persistent identities (and repeat encounters), events (and their density), daily incentives, and offline communities as well as anti-patterns such as anonymous players, empty spaces, too many gameplay modes, and separation of players by skill. He also talks about the challenges of matches and matchmaking, which often necessitate large amounts of concurrent players to be viable, and the issue of matchmaking queue churn, resulting in low repeat interactions. The talk also covers the topic of similarities; tribalism, nationalism, their negative effects, and how to work with similarities in a positive context through fictional places and cultures. Daniel speaks to reciprocity, how it levels up relationships by building trust for more meaningful and deeper interactions, and the challenges of building trust, which is easily destroyed by cheating, scamming, or even premature disclosure which then kills relationship leveling.
I think the whole talk is fantastic, but the friendship levels of solitary play, parallel play, ambient/accidental coop, soft coop, and hard coop, are something any multiplayer game designer should think about because designing games around those different levels can have far-reaching effects and give games the proper appeal they need to grow and thrive.
The low trust, medium trust, and high trust Venn diagrams of increasingly more discrete player skills can also be found on Raph Koster’s website in his post about The Trust Spectrum. It’s a great read. The topics apply to all games, but it makes me appreciate Deep Rock Galactic even more for its well-thought-out design.
I find it funny that Daniel calls out retrofitting a social architecture as hard because I define architecture fundamentally as “that which is difficult to change later.” The context or nature of the architecture is usually less important.
This talk also reminds me of Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet F***wad Theory, which is soon coming up on its 20th anniversary.
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