Advanced Social Curve Design - Empowering the Community - Extra Credits

last week we left off with Emily finally feeling the joy in overcoming Social Challenges feeling the rush of putting together a great party and stomping a hard dungeon or making a killing manipulating the auction house we left off with her experiencing the Social Challenges in the game much the way we experience mechanical challenges within games as something engaging something to be actively overcome now we're going to explore how we got her there as a designer this is where we let Emily feel feel like she's getting away with something like she's almost gaming the system somehow by successfully tackling social problems we let her amass an exciting amount of wealth by trading cleverly we let her beat areas she feels like she shouldn't be able to beat yet areas we designed specifically with the intention of feeling that way when you're with a group we're still heavily rewarding her for social play but now we're not quite as blatant about it instead of handholding we present Emily with problems that have a social solution and let her come to those Solutions herself let her feel crafty when she reaps the rewards of playing socially so how do we do this well at

this point Emily should be fairly fluent with the game's mechanics so we can tie Social Challenges to Mechanical ones the easiest example of this is party composition as she progresses through the game she can start to learn enough of the mechanics to think about what the optimal party for a given dungeon might be what that party is is simply a question of understanding the mechanical challenges the dungeon presents and the systems she'll have to overcome as a player but actually assembling that party is a social challenge as fun as it is to dream up what the perfect party might be it feels even more awesome to actually find the right people and just go Crush that dungeon to give another example games like Eve online present the player with complex supply chain problems through their crafting system that are mechanical problems best solved through social play the player May technically know where to get the components they need but it's often much less risky for the player to find other players who have the skills or Allegiance necessary to safely acquire those goods and trade for them less risky than trying to get those components themselves anyway or another brilliant example from Eve is crafting High l ships crafting highle ships in

Eve often requires an immense amount of low-level resources so many in fact that it would take a player years to collect them all by themselves so instead highlevel players solve this problem by getting large numbers of low-level players who still get some benefit out of this low-level mining to acquire those resources for them then either directly or through the in-game market they pay an amount for those resources that's trivial to a high level player but very lucrative if you're just starting out anyway back to our MMO once we've got Emily enjoying and getting satisfaction out of Social Challenges the next step is to get her forming social bonds and actually friending people luckily this should happen fairly automatically once she's at the point where Social Challenges are something she wants to engage in still it's important to design this to be as streamlined as possible we want to make it easy for her to go back and look at who she's played with in the past so that during downtime she can remember oh yeah that person was awesome I really should friend them or so that next time she looks for a group to play with she has an easy starting point even providing an unobtrusive UI element that asks her if she'd like to friend people

after she's grouped with them for a certain period of time can encourage this forming of social bonds by this point Emily's ready to advance to the final stage of our curve social play where the game mechanics simply become a platform to test her skill within the game's social framework this is sort of the rating stage of the game and at this point the sky is the limit the lower end of this stage is maybe simply being a guild member but on the higher end is everything from EV online style conspiracies to running a Wiki or a fan site in between those extreme ends you'll find Guild leaders ship which is the point at which the curtain is drawn back and it becomes unavoidable for the player to realize that their gameplay involves overcoming Social Challenges even more than it involves overcoming mechanical ones if you're really looking to create this highlevel social play I'd encourage you to break down this category even further but for our purposes this category generally begins when the difficulty of the social tasks the player taking on outweighs the difficulty of the mechanical ones ask anybody who's been in a good guild and they'll tell you that the raids themselves aren't that hard what's ult

is getting enough competent people together teaching them all what to do and getting them to act in concert so to help Emily get engaged in this aspect of social play once again we start by offering her rewards for doing so but here the mechanical reward is often outweighed by the fantasy or social reward social reward is easier to talk about we'll start there Prestige Fame bragging rights these are all social rewards and you'll find that at this stage of the game these matter more for many players than minor mechanical upgrades if we can design ways to give Emily these rewards whether it be a standing on a leaderboard a systemwide message or a suit of armor that lets everybody around know that she helped slay a god once you'll draw more players like her into this level of social play than you will with any mechanical reward also for Many Games highlevel Social play plays directly into the fantasy of the game you know when you pick up a game and you love the idea of being a character in that Universe of being a hero of helping to save the world that's the fantasy often a group of Mighty Heroes desperately fighting back toback

against a cataclysmic evil feels like fulfilling that fantasy it's the epitome of why you came to that game in the first place successfully delivering on that feeling will encourage people like Emily to participate in this late stage social play people who otherwise might never have joined in and this is true for all types of games by the way really feeling like a squad executing unit tactics being an elite Battalion it just feels awesome those things play right into the fantasy of military games obviously but heck even working together for an epic Barn raising back in the Farmville days used fantasy to bring people together for highle social play so don't neglect this aspect when you're constructing your endgame Social Challenges as to the best ways to graduate Emily into this level of play that's a bit harder to break down because by this point as designers we're trusting that the community itself has come far enough to do some of the heavy lifting for us and that they are teaching other players the ropes of endgame social play themselves at a certain point you really want to let the community take some ownership over the social experience the main thing here is to cut down on it ation time for your

first in-game challenges so that if Emily's Guild fails while they're learning to work as a large group like they wipe in a rate or something their experience isn't too frustrating and they can just get back up and try again okay so at this point Emily has completely mastered our social difficulty curve as designers from here on it's all just ease of use stuff we can try to streamline the process of finding an appropriate Guild or Clan or Battalion to work with we can give Guild Masters useful in-game Guild management tools we can even do things like starting and seeding the fan Wiki for our game so that Emily and her fellow players can take it over without having to actually create one from scratch that about wraps it up but one last thing I've talked a lot about easing Emily's path as she tackles new Social Challenges but it's important to note easing doesn't mean making automatic what you want to do is make it as easy as possible for her to do what she's trying to do and see if it works think of good tools and good UI in this case as analagous to good controls for mechanics because even mechanics challenges aren't engaging without good controls ultimately our goal should be

to remove as many barriers between her and trying to solve the Social Challenges in front of her as possible what we don't want to do is just take over and solve the challenges we're presenting for her if we look to games like Warhammer online the open group system basically took all the challenge out of grouping which in turn meant that players didn't form social bonds within the game because grouping became this Anonymous automatic thing rather than a social challenge if you have to air on this air on the side of ease of use but it's something to be mindful of as you design so with that I hope hope you've enjoyed our digression on social difficulty curve just remember in Many Games Social Challenges should be just as engaging as mechanical ones and it's our job as designers to help the player get better at these challenges so we can provide them more interesting more nuanced Social Challenges as they go see you next week [Applause] [Music]