Intermediate Social Curve Design - Introducing Cooperation Rewards - Extra Credits

last week you may recall that we talked about the social difficulty curve about the importance of crafting your game's progression of social skill challenges just like you would the mechanical ones we walked through the early steps of acclimating our hypothetical player here Emily to our hypothetical game social systems mostly by allowing her to ignore them long enough to get used to the game's mechanics and rules today we're going to start providing some incentive for her to climb that social curve and break down the steps required to bring Emily to the next level of social play our game can offer okay so by now Emily's had some time to learn the ins and outs of our MMOs gameplay and get herself settled into the world now it's time for stage two or the phase I call impersonal interactions this is where we start introducing early social interactions to Emily's play experience these will usually be short often lasting no more than a game session and they'll be very utilitarian they'll also usually involve a minimum of real communication Emily may not quite be to the point where she's ready to actually talk to other players but she starting

to check who else is in her Zone when she quests she's begun to spam party invites to other players around her level to get help when she hits a big challenge if she was playing a MOA this is the point where maybe she'd start pinging objectives for her team or sounding alerts when an opponent's missing from her Lane but even more important than thinking about what specific actions Emily's taking in each of these categories is the part we game designers too often forget how do we help her move from one category to another first obviously we can offer her incentives if she's going to come out of her shell we've got to give her a reason to maybe we could make it so that working with a group in certain segments of our game makes it easier for her to achieve Victory or get better loot or level up faster of course that doesn't mean we should make grouping always be more beneficial than playing alone in fact depending on what type of game you're creating keeping solo play viable throughout is usually important but as a designer if we're trying to get Emily to become more proficient at the social play in our game there needs to be a place in our design specifically built to help her realize that interacting in the most minor ways with the people around her will benefit her a great deal

once we have that point figured out we have to soften the discomfort Emily might feel when she reaches it first we've got to choose when this point should come we want to aim for right when Emily's become comfortable with the core mechanics and the basic gameplay is no longer overwhelming in and of itself next we want to make sure the initial Social Challenges we present her have a very low social difficulty compared to the reward they give so for example we want to make sure that the first dungeon we create that requires a party to get through doesn't require that the party communicate too much to get through it that it can be tackled by a up group that hasn't even spent much time fussing over stuff like Optimal party composition finally we need to streamline this process by giving Emily tools and UI that make taking on these Social Challenges as painless as possible without making them automatic simple party searches objective pings that don't require her to type open world group events friend recommendations and non-f Facebook friending for mobile and social games all good examples of this at this point if you've done it right Emily's progressed to the point where she's routinely doing basic social tasks she's going going to the auction house when

she needs an item she's joining groups she's well on her way up the social difficulty curve of our game of course there are still tons of Social Challenges still ahead of her she hasn't yet really become comfortable playing socially and tackling challenges with other players on a regular basis she isn't even close to the point of actually forming strong social connections or even friendships with her fellow players and she probably isn't quite ready to take on an active role in a guild or something either but we can help her get there now Emily's ready for stage three personal interactions and social victories this is the point in the game where we want to help her go from being reluctant to enter into social play to actively enjoying overcoming Social Challenges since our Collective thinking on social play is still in its infancy we designers often think of player engagement only in terms of solving mechanical problems rather than social ones but anybody who's played in MMO extensively knows the joy of finding a total Steel on the auction house and turning it around for a profit or of finally getting together a dungeon group that kicks ass and plays regularly so you can have a killer party whenever you want any MOBA player will tell you how awesome it is to go into a room with

an organized team who you just click with or even simply finding a Duo partner with whom you share some unspoken Synergy there's actually a lot of joy to be found in overcoming social problems when we do it we feel victorious in a way not totally unlike what we feel when we overcome mechanical ones and it's at this third stage of personal interactions and social victories that we should be allowing Emily opportunities to find that Joy join us next week as we walk through just how to get the player there and as we watch Emily climb to the highest levels of social play see you next [Music] [Applause] [Music] week