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.
Yes, I was looking for mention of the Bartle EASK types and the synergy. Virtual socialisation with no proxy activity is just Zoom.
> "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
Agree. If anything, avatars in spaces is the one thing that's been tried a lot and doesn't quite work. Second Life is still there if you want it.
I spent a considerable amount of time in Second Life ... 15 years ago. The place was teeming with users that had left Star Wars Galaxies and were happy with the social interaction in SL.
So maybe the early version of Star Wars had the best balance between social and gaming elements? I ask because I never played it so I cannot judge, but looks like it originally catered for a larger group of differentiser types.
Edit: I forgot that the full name was SW Galaxies...
For my money, Star Wars Galaxies is the gold standard here, imo that game was far ahead of its time, and we will start to see more games like that in the future (I honestly feel like WoW set the genre back by 10-20 years). It was the perfect mix of social and gameplay, that enticed a broad range of player-types to come together and create little virtual worlds where stories could unfold.
Of course EVE has done some truly remarkable work in this realm as well but it's definitely not enough "gameplay" for your average gamer.
>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.
that's also why people like to drink, or do anything else while being social :)
I think we have not even mastered being social AFK without playing a game!
AFK = away from keyboard, i prefer that over IRL (in real life) since being at the computer is still real life
>The torrent trial of the century continues, and today, there are some pretty shocking revelations about just how much the prosecution knows. Is that a tinge of remorse I hear from The Pirate Bay dudes?
>• The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde (aka brokep) doesn't like copyright! "I like things that are not protected by copyright, this is a non-issue."
>• The prosecutor knows the secret code for talking on the internets! "When did you meet [Gottfrid] for the first time IRL?" The judge asks, "IRL?" The prosecutor, being with it, coolly informs the judge it means "in real life," sucka.
>• Oh snap, maybe he doesn't! The Pirate Bay's Peter responds, "We do not use the expression IRL." No, everything is in real life. We use AFK—away from keyboard." This makes for a sad prosecutor: "It seems I am a little bit out of date."
> "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.
Neither the article nor anybody here has mentioned it, but VRChat is the only one of these games that seem to work. All you do is walk around as an avatar talking with other players with their own character avatars (note these are often characters from other IP, there isn't an avatar creator like you would have in the Sims or anything like that).
I think what we've been seeing with hubs.mozilla.com is the threshold for "game" can be quite low. People need something to do, yes, but what this is could be barely game-like: give them a few ways to create objects, draw, etc, and that might be good enough.
Still it seems a squandered opportunity. Instagram is no substitute for shared spaces.
And 'gamedevs know' about blockbuster team-based shooters, and a very few other big sellers. Remember, most people don't play video games at all. What would they find appealing? Clearly, not what gamedevs are delivering.
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.
That's a common meme, but in reality there are more solid single player games out and coming out than you can play unless you play games full time. Just google lists of recent "best single-player games" -- you've really played all of those? Not to mention the current boom of indie games, almost all of them single player. You don't need to be a big studio anymore to get a game on a console, it's truly amazing.
You probably just don't follow gaming like you used to as a kid so assume it has gone to shit just because multiplayer games create the biggest waves. Or maybe you just don't really care for gaming like you used to.
Kinda like when people assume there's no good music during the hey day of dubstep. Or when people lament there's nothing to watch just because they only watch The Office and never branch out.
Yup. I just finished putting 100 hours into Dark Souls 3. Anyone who says there aren't any quality single-player games anymore just isn't paying attention; video games are better than they've ever been. Just to list a few great single-player games I've enjoyed over the past couple of years:
* XCOM: Enemy Within
* SOMA
* MGS V: The Phantom Pain
* Dark Souls 1 & 3
* Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
* DOOM (2016)
* Nier: Automata
* Hyper Light Drifter
* Hollow Knight
* The Talos Principle
* The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
* Wolfenstein: The New Order
* Furi
* Katana Zero
* Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Plus many more; I put significantly more hours into video games than many people (probably to the detriment of my career, lol) and I am barely scratching the surface of what's out there. Times are good for entertainment!
I’m sort of the opposite of the poster, as I look for mostly multiplayer games. This month alone you could have gotten Gears of War: Tactics and Half Life: Alyx which are strictly single player. I really thought Jedi Fallen Order had multiplayer, but that is also single player. Cyberpunk looks like another amazing single player game coming out this year.
It’s very easy to say ‘music is just not the same as the music back in the day’, which is never true. Just catch up, stop with the developer only MacBooks and get an powerful gaming laptop (similar prices for some odd reason even though the specs are better) or console, and you’ll at least now have a chance to dip your toes back in.
> Yup. I just finished putting 100 hours into Dark Souls 3. Anyone who says there aren't any quality single-player games anymore just isn't paying attention
The Dark/Demon Souls franchise is the undisputed king of forced online participation. MGS V has the same forced-online elements in the form of bases. You are literally penalized in both games for attempting to play entirely single-player.
I haven't played enough of the other examples to comment.
People famously play those games without an ethernet cable attached simply to play with some kind of similarity to a true single-player game -- I think that points to something being different between today's single-player games and yesterday's.
> The Dark/Demon Souls franchise is the undisputed king of forced online participation. MGS V has the same forced-online elements in the form of bases. You are literally penalized in both games for attempting to play entirely single-player.
I played both Dark Souls 3 and MGS V to completion and never once engaged in multiplayer, except for that one time in DS3 where you have to get killed by a player if I recall?
The bases in MGS V were completely optional to the main story line. I put 100+ hours into the game without engaging once in those.
I think referring to either game as having "forced online participation" is a huge stretch.
The Witness is a masterpiece. It blew me away when I played it the first time (I just started another playthrough of it last night too). Although now I have since played The Outer Wilds, and I think it does something that feels similar to The Witness, but executed it a little better, despite being a different game. The world building is a lot stronger in The Outer Wilds, and it's more of a technical achievement, and it a lot more tense and dangerous.
Although I do think Jonathon Blow successfully dug into and found just about every single possible interesting puzzle you can make with moving from a dot and drawing a line through a maze to the end, including some really crazy things that most people wouldn't think of and wouldn't be possible if he didn't create a giant world for those puzzles to live in.
Prey - Doom 2016 - Subnautica - Tacoma - Zelda Breath of the Wild - Mario Odyssey - Cities: Skylines - Oxygen Not Included
All very different games, all very much single player focused (Doom is a very complete without ever going online). Tons more out there for every play style and taste. Steam will drown you in games if you wish.
Edit: notice that this list spans many years, with a single player game there is no need to rush and play it the day it drops. There is a huge backlog of games to tap into.
Subnautica was so good. Pop in and bugs aside, that was just the right balance of survival, crafting, exploration, narrative without forcing it on you. Top10 ever.
I'm excited for Below Zero. Bought EA Subnautica just to give Unknown Worlds money (loved their work on Natural Selection 2), and wow, turns out to be one of the best gaming experiences I've had in the last 5 years.
I bought early access subnautica too, a little too early if fact. Had to restart 5 times or so over months before I could make it to the end. So I’ll wait a little longer for Below Zero, but it’ll be worth it.
It was intersecting to watch their progress on their public Trello board as well. They used it pretty well.
Yea this. There are more excellent single player games today than there is time to play. Just my PS4 backlog alone is hundreds of hours of gameplay that I know I will never have the time to play.
"want to shove multiplayer/online aspects into every game"
I don't think they want that, exactly. What they want is to be able to sell a continuous stream of microtransactions, and the easiest way to do that is let people see each other and then sell them prettyshiny models and textures you can use while preening in front of other people. That necessitates an online component to allow the social context in which to preen.
I think the problem is they haven't come up with a way to sell a $5.00 expansion that amounts to about two-four person weeks of work on an extra model and some testing for single player games. (I've seen it done, and I'm sure it sells some, but not enough for them.) Single player added content takes, like, real work to get anything anyone will buy.
Making everything multiplayer on its own terms is an expensive and risky proposition. I don't think it's a terminal goal on its own; it has to be in the service of something.
I love single player games. But I think you have it wrong. There are plenty of single player options.
The problem is there are very few if any good multiplayer options. Multiplayer gaming has become grind-fests where every game tries to encourage tens of thousands of hours of playtime to keep you engaged for decades. They don't rely on the fun of the natural game-play to keep you engaged, but instead invent casino like mechanics to force addiction of something you really do not like to do.
Nope. I'm with you. I love a good single player game, although I've also always loved couch multiplayer. Never been a fan of online multiplayer.
I understand that people like it and that's fine, but the idea that we "need" more video games that are social first and games second? No, sorry, not on board with that at all. I find it an almost ludicrous assertion (clickbait headline aside): who's going to play a social game that isn't first and foremost a good game?
I agree with you. I remember first playing Skyrim and it was magic.
I think when online came along, money came into the equation at odds with entertainment.
I think the example that most illustrated this to me was Plants vs. Zombies after EA bought them. The funny whimsical version 1 was replaced with version 2. They replaced the plants you would level up and earn with the same plants, but with a price in dollars hovering above them. You could still play through and earn them, but the equations seemed to be tweaked.
I will continue to pay for quality single-player experiences that don't rope in online or artificial grinding or monetization... (if the genre isn't slowly evaporating)
The PS4 is known for incredible single player story led games. I do miss the days of adventure gaming but I think Indie games have that covered now, you just have to go look for it.
Edit: I think it also requires a lot more capital to do multiplayer right, unlike single player where anybody from a hobby game dev all the way up to the big Sony studios can provide an equally satisfying experience.
As other people have said in reply to you, this really isn't true anymore, just true of (some of the) biggest of the big publishers.
I almost exclusively play single player games and still have a large backlog I've been working through the past couple of years that seems to keep getting bigger because more games keep coming out.
There's plenty of great single player games coming out. The Outer Wilds alone is one of the best single player experiences I have ever had in gaming, and that came out in 2019 (and won a Bafta for Game of the Year, so it got some recognition too).
Currently playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which is a nice long single player story that just came out a month ago.
But besides that, in the past few years there's been Disco Elysium, Person00a 5 Royal, God of War, Spider-Man, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Outer Worlds (different than Outer Wilds...not as good, but still worth playing), AI: The Somnium Files, Resident Evil 2 (remake), Resident Evil 3 (remake), Death Stranding, Devil May Cry 5, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Kingdom Hearts 3, Zelda: Link's Awakening Remake, Plague Tale, Shenmue III, Sinking City, Astral Chain, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Detroit: Become Human, Pillars of Eternity II, Return of the Obra Dinn, Life is Strange 2, Control, Trials of Mana... and that's just since 2018.
Doesn't even include 2017 that has amazing games like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nier:Automata, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Hellblade, Night in the Woods, A Hat in Time, South Park: Fractured But Whole, Divinity: Original Sin II, Doki Doki Literature Club, Golf Story, Danganronpa v3 (but play the first two before that), Thimbleweed Park, What Remains of Edith Finch, etc.
I even had to leave out other great single player games that don't really have stories but are really good, like Into The Breach, Baba Is You, Mario Odyssey, Yoshi's Crafted World, Spyro Reignited, Mario Maker 2, hell even the game talked about in the article, Animal Crossing, can be played single player just fine.
If you can't find something you like out of everything here, then I'm not sure what type of game you're looking for. Granted, single player games aren't being pushed by EA or Activision or other major publishers, but they're still being made and are still very popular.
The reason is they've been stealing games since 1997 with UO, that was the plan. For those of us who remember kali and kahn IPX emulation over the early internet that allowed us to play warcraft 2, doom, descent, duke 3d, etc.
The internet changed the incentives because it made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it, and therefore there is no incentive to make high risk high definition games with lots of content when you can make low risk multiplayer games with tonnes of microtransactions.
That's what killed dedicated servers, once stupid kids started paying for skins in game or mounts in wow, that killed any incentive for game devs and publishers to make software we owned and controlled.
You have to see the internet is one giant world sized PC, two or more networked computers behave as a single machine.
So they see us as dumb terminals they can put in game/in app stores on every persons device in the world.
That was the whole plan from the beginning, to get rid of software ownership by holding back game and app files since most people are ignorant to how computers work.
They even have industry meetings about how stupid the public is:
They always wanted to take control of customers PC's and reprogram them to obey them and they have done that with Steam, mmo's (aka rebranded RPG's with a subscription and non ownership).
That's why we have uplay, origin, steam, etc.
The last 20 years has been the public committing suicide on software ownership and I've watched in horror as everyone, even my fellow nerds falling for this scam which was all part of conspiracy to take control of your computing device.
The tech industry's long term goal was to move us to an authoritarian model of computing device ownership where you no longer control the files or OS or device. That's what mobile was about.
Microsoft and the industry want to do that to the PC and windows 10 is their first version of the OS to turn the PC into a locked down platform like mobile.
> made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it
To be fair, the public were also "stealing" software from the publishers.
I'm very familiar with the "information feudalism" argument you're making, and it has a valid core, but you're way overstating it especially as a conspiracy or authoritarianism. Especially if you're going against the groundbreaking UO.
And no, gamers can't "Steal" files, since the nature of comptuer files means as soon as you have a copy of a file you can't control it because files are just numbers, so to equivocate software piracy "(henceforth referred to as file copying)" as stealing is bs. We could make a good faith argument, lobbyists who wrote IP law governing software removed the publics property rights to own the software they buy (aka stealing their human rights to own the stuff they buy).
Since silicon valley has always hated other companies controlling their own software and their PC's. The history of IBM, microsoft, etc, is a history of criminality.
So no, the conspiracy is quite real. They've had these plans in the cards for a long time, they've had conferences like the below before internet of things was even a thing...
UO was not some "revolutionary new genre", it was you being illiterate, a literate consumer would have got the Renamed RPG "mmo" for a fixed price. and demanded the server exe's to run his own shards.
The fact that private UO servers exist for world of warcraft and ultima online, is proof that mmo is a fake genre invented to con the gullible out of game ownership. You just fell for the propaganda.
I can't be bothered to even unpack some of this loony RMS-level cutesyness, like that WoW is "stolen from the public" because it's a server-client game.
But how does your ideal kumbaya world, whatever that is, prevent cheating in networked games?
Agreed. Also more specifically I'd really like if people rediscovered how to make great linear games rather than turning everything into an open-world setting.
There's a good talk on youtube where Warren Spector talks about the original Deus Ex design and stresses that it's a linear game from a story perspective with a lot of freedom in how to design the character. The last Deus Ex went down a completely different route with a focus on a sort-of open-world story-wise which I think takes way too much tension and the ability for the writer to design the narrative out of the game.
I exclusively play single player console games[1] and I never have trouble finding games that provide an excellent experience. There's more great games out there then I could ever play, I have multiple games that I haven't even opened yet.
Sounds like you just aren't into games as much anymore.
[1] Except Animal Crossing New Horizons because all my IRL friends are playing too and they added me to a Facebook group where we exchange items. I'd like this game just as much if I played single player-I did for the first month.
I feel like I'm the opposite. When I play a single player game I feel so alone and like I'm wasting my time you know? Maybe it's cause I already don't have much social contact in my day to day life although being a teacher you'd think I do? When I step into a multiplayer game whether with friends or with random people, I feel like each interaction and event is totally new and unique and special. In single player games it all just feels so scripted.
>When I step into a multiplayer game whether with friends or with random people, I feel like each interaction and event is totally new and unique and special. In single player games it all just feels so scripted.
I don't know, someone calling me a cunt and ragequitting a Rocket League match loses its fresh, unique and special feeling after a while. And I can't really tell apart any 12-year-old French boy screaming into a $2 microphone from the next one.
I'd rather play a really scripted game than roll the dice to see what kind of a shitstorm I land into.
There are more games than ever. The only thing that has changed is that discoverability got worse. Finding experiences tailored to your own preferences has always been a difficult problem.
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.
Except that Lance Priebe himself said he specifically made Club Penguin to only “appear to be social” with a lot of the multiplayer interactions directly designed to be superficial and emphemeral - making it easy for kids to pop in and away without any significant time of talking and with props and items designed to distract from conversation. This was on purpose - as moderating a kids chat rooms was expensive and logistically inherently difficult to prevent grooming etc.
That may be - club penguin was part of the list of children browser games at the time providing real time player interaction. I listed it because I imagine that's the one most people in tech know because it got a lot of media attention but I admit I know the least about it.
Club penguin limited chat as opposed to habbo hotel and moviestarplanet which had, surprisingly, free style chatting (at least in the non-US versions).
These were both from scandinavian companies which had a more liberal attitude. As a result, the player connections were deeper.
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.
Video games have won! It's time to emerge from the defensive bunker that they must be "productive" by improving your creativity or problem solving or reflexes or whatever. They're a form of entertainment on par or even beyond movies, shows, etc. Time spent enjoying video games is no more wasted than when enjoying those other forms of media, although it is true some video games demand much greater time investment (the entirety of Game of Thrones is only 63.5 hours in length, for example, which is easily surpassed in length by many popular single-player games).
I do think things like LoL are a huge drain on some people's lives, though, honestly.
And that huge drain is related to the addictiveness that cdiamand was talking about. I haven't heard of Game of Thrones ending relationships, but I know WoW has caused divorces. I'll leave out the people I know personally, but stories are legion. E.g.: https://www.olganon.org/node/20104
I know that growing up before the rise of online gaming we had no alternative but to play games with one another in person. There were real consequences to saying bad things to other people we knew in real life. This disappears when there are no consequences to online behavior, the social interactions are ephemeral, and you'll never see the same players again.
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.)
I know I'm narrow-minded, but the only way I'd ever consider playing online games with strangers is if there was a age-filter that let's me play with 30-somethings that have a mortgage, and I've never seen that.
I largely agree, but the flip side of the coin is that if there is an environment where you repeatdly play with the same individuals over and over again, they stop being strangers.
I'm really starting to feel there is possibility to innovate in this space. Not so much in creating the games themselves, but in the matchmaking systems they use and the comms to enable the building up of interpersonal relationships and positives social norms within a "game" context.
This still happens in games where people tend to play on the same relatively small (tens or hundreds of players) servers.
Space station 13 is like that because each server has slightly different code base, admins and server rules.
I wonder if we'll see a game company using franchising: server owner sells access to the server and introduces minor tweaks to the game rules, while the main company manages the infrastructure.
Serendipitous interactions with people you know happens all the time in the OpenSimulator community (which of course overlaps with the Second Life community). I frequently run into people I know at various events, including people I used to hang out with years ago on servers that no longer exist.
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.
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.
You are downvoted but I have this feeling as well.
When people bring up Animal Crossing as an example... I mean the game has one of the worst online system ever + basically 0 social functions. It's an OK sandbox game but I wouldn't call it as a social platform.
MMOs solved this problem years ago but instant gratification is the king now. Love me some FFXIV but I can see people why don't want to play a game where you have to invest hundreds of hours to reach anything. But for a lot of us that's the main appeal of it.
I think the idea isn’t that Animal Crossing has the best online experience but rather that it’s a game you can play with zero skills, with no pressure to keep buying new things, and you can play it for very short periods of time and still accomplish something.
I tried Fortnite the other day and could hardly get into a game trying to navigate past all the “buy this” and “buy that” buttons. It’s a sales platform that encourages you to buy buy buy. A lot of MMOs are the same way. Even the latest Assassins Creed (which is a decidedly single player game) has to check their servers every time you open the game to see if there is anything new they want to ask you to buy.
There aren’t a lot of big name games these days where you can just buy the game and play the game. They all need billboards and micro transactions and DLC and season passes and worst of all as you get older: they all need plenty of skill and free time.
There is a huge lack of games that respect your free time. Animal Crossing is one of the few.
>There is a huge lack of games that respect your free time.
Sure, they respect your free time as long as you're willing to pay for it.
GTA Online for example is massively grindy if you want to get anything since they sell the in-game currency for pretty bonkers prices. Want to save yourself a hundred hours of grinding? Just buy in-game currency with $100 American.
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.
Not really IMHO, they use the social pressure to make people spend money with them. But they are much to limited to be a "social platform". There just a topic you speak about when you are one a "social platform" (or meet in real live).
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.
(High Engine+Infrastructure Dev Costs, High Content Dev Cost, Cost for frequent new content and other cost to keep people playing, much competition even against "old" games like WoW, etc.)
So I'm not really surprised if companies opt for CoOp and non-massive multi player concepts over MMOs and if they have a still working MMO prefer to maintain (milk) it over any new development.
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.
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.