it's been strange to me watching the
evolution of social games and by social
games I don't mean games running on a
social network like Facebook I mean any
game where you interact with other
people sometimes friends sometimes
strangers from across the world I would
just call them multiplayer games but in
the last few years we've seen an
explosion of online interaction in our
games and not just social interactions
in terms of your standard synchronous
multiplayer I'm talking about all kinds
from the messaging system in Dark Souls
to the chess by male style of attacking
villages in clash of clans because the
Internet's become ubiquitous the real
world dollar value of community has
become clear to publishers and so more
and more games seem pressured to include
a social element or tie-in and yet
despite that on all the projects James
has worked on the idea of a social
difficulty curve has never been
discussed there's a concept in game
design we sometimes call the difficulty
curve it's a graph of how a game's
difficulty should increase over time in
relation to a player's skill at that
game we've settled on a version that's
almost universally satisfying you may
have seen this before
see this oscillating line moving
diagonally upward as the player skill
increases it's such a fundamental
concept that at this point it's
something almost every designer we know
uses intuitively on most of their work
heck if you go to a school for game
design it's probably one of the first
things they'll teach you but while we
use this for almost every part of our
games from plotting out our levels to
figuring out the overall arc of the game
we've got no analogous concept for the
social side of play when you get down to
it though a challenge is a challenge
whether it's mechanical or social and
I've clearly seen games fail because
they're social play deviates wildly from
that curve so let's talk about this
because as we create games which involve
interpersonal interaction it's important
to recognize that a player's skill
within the social framework of a game
increases over time
let's take MMOs as an example if you are
anything like me you start out just
playing solo then you periodically form
pickup groups and begin to use the
auction house next you start adding
people to your friends list soon you've
got a group you adventure with
semi-regularly and you find yourself
using the auction house all the time to
make money and to put together the
complex ingredient chains you need for
crafting then as you get toward the
level cap you join a guild and you start
to take on multi-party raids
hey if you're a more active player than
I usually am maybe you finally step up
to do the heavy lifting and actually run
a guild of your own this is a fairly
good structure for the social experience
you can see clearly how a player like me
progresses from tackling minimal social
tasks to taking on things I would refer
to as having a high level of social
difficulty of course even if you're
building a game that focuses on
multiplayer your game doesn't have to
have all of these stages hardly after
all there are plenty of great
free-for-all and team deathmatch games
out there but the one thing your game
can't do is have the latter stages of
this progression without the former ones
and the one thing it absolutely has to
do is help the player get better at or
become more comfortable with the social
tasks the game presents just like it
does with standard gameplay challenges
so over the next three weeks we're going
to go through the stages of social skill
progression step by step starting today
with the process of introducing your
player to social systems and offering
incentives to invite them to come out of
their shell you can break social
difficulty down even further than we
will in this series but hopefully this
will serve as a jumping-off point ok so
say hello to Emily she's just started
playing our MMO and we're gonna walk
through the early steps of its social
difficulty curve here we go
to start with we have the first step of
the curve solo play this one's fairly
obvious it's the early period where
emily is essentially just playing the
game by herself
during this phase she'll be getting used
to the rules and the mechanics of the
game and she probably won't really want
to be distracted by having to interact
with other players mmo's have a lot
going on she's probably got enough on
her plate already in many games this
phase is best done in an offline mode
and it's why games that we think of as
primarily multiplayer like Call of Duty
still have an extensive single-player
campaign of course the solo experience
doesn't have to be offline many online
only games achieve it as well the
starting areas and mmo's often serve
this function often letting the player
play essentially by themselves but even
in competitive multiplayer games like
World of Tanks new players often begin
by just treating the other players as if
they were in pcs not really socially
interacting just playing the game
however they think is best and the maps
they're thrown into when they start
allow for this lack of team play in a
way that later maps simply won't
multiplayer games where this step isn't
provided are substantially harder for
many people to get into anyway the key
here is simply to find ways to allow
Emily that cushion period at the outset
of our game where she can get her
footing even if that period doesn't
really represent the most exciting
experience our game can offer if you
look at dominations or any of the other
clash of clans style games you'll see
them doing this in fact most of the
free-to-play mobile market has learned
this lesson well and no matter what you
may think of the rest of their games
this is something we can learn from but
this is only the beginning
literally join us next week as we track
Emily's climb higher up the social
difficulty curve and really delve into
the meat of how to get your player
socially engaged with your game see you
then