22nd
Designer authorship in multiplayer games
Reading Leigh’s post to her Gamasutra blog today definitely sparked some designer-angst in me regarding a game concept I’m currently wrestling with.
I want to design the game in such a way that will encourage meaningful interactions between players and encourage them to think critically about their relationship with their allies. Succeeding at this would probably require carefully crafting the game to lead players in these directions. But most multiplayer games tend to be fairly hands-off when it comes to how players will interact with one another. They setup the mechanics, yes, but the dynamics are usually pretty open to interpretation.
For example, the main mechanic that facilitates interaction in Parking Wars is ticketing. If someone is illegally parked on your street, you can ticket them. That’s essentially it as far as strictly pre-built interactions. But of course players can choose to form strategic alliances with other players. They can offer a new player a safe harbor in which to grow, if only so that said newbie can be preyed upon for even more money later on.
Parking Wars is a super-simple multiplayer game, for sure, but even there the possibility space of how people will interact is fairly robust. Partly this is due to the fact that the game is build on Facebook, and hence players can easily bring their friends in to play and use other Facebook utilities to interact with one another and communicate about strategies.
So right of the bat, questions are these:
- How can I design the game in such a way that it guides players towards more interesting social interactions and relationships?
- What are those interactions and types of relationships I’m looking to promote?
- How much should I focus on putting my “authorship” into the game to guide that experience?
