Contrasting Social Experiences - Sissy Fight vs. Casablanca
For the first assignment in MMO class, I've decided to compare the social experiences between Sissy Fight and Casablanca.
Sissy Fight's in-game messaging system (the speach balloons over a character's head) allowed players to communicate with each other in real time. The caveat here is that players can only do this with up to 5 other people. In the games I played, this lead to easy, meandering conversations.
The choices a player can make in sissy fight are fairly limited. No matter how much scheming and psychological mind games I'd like to play, everything must be filtered through 6 choices. By doing this, I found the game encouraged me to make use of the in-game messaging system : Since I didn't have to do a lot of work to make my next move, I could do it quickly, and chat with other people.
The drawback of the messaging system is that the game itself doesn't encourage me to use it. Lots of the people I played with didn't say a single thing during the game, and were able to play just as well. A player who used the messaging system to direct actions (e.g. "everybody attack Scott Gillies!") had an advantage, but using the messaging system wasn't required for game play.
Casablanca, on the other hand, had a messaging system that was inherant to it's gameplay. Straight from their website: "It's a mobile social networking game. Like a cross between Facebook and the game 'Mafia'....The more people you meet, the more powerful you become".
In Casablanca, you play as either the resistance or the occupation. The Resistance is meant to create as large a network as possilbe, without any occupation members infiltrating it. The Occupation is meant to infiltrate as many resistance networks as possible. In other words, make as many friends as possible, just make sure they're the right kind of friends.
In this case, people were far more willing to talk in game. The communication system was a bulletin board site, where messages could be left for somebody, and read later. The turn based messaging system was more encouraging to me than sissy fight's real time system. I didn't have to be logged on for somebody to communicate, so I didn't have to spend my time at the comptuer in order to build networks. I could come and go as I pleased.
As an Occupation player, I kept striking up conversations with members of the dirty, stinking Resistance. I enjoyed the conversations - every single one was themed to the game, and was light hearted beacuse of it. The second I was discovered to be the cold, hard fist of the Occupation, though, that conversation slammed shut. So while I was meeting people, relationships were also abruptly severed. The co-operation and communication between Occupation members, however, grew as we thought of new strategies to use in game. In order to effectively infiltrate the Resistance, multiple Occupation agents had to try at once. This required communication between us.
One thing to note in the social dynamic of Casablanca was that it was a very focused experience. Since there was so much thought that went in to orchestrating a successfull infiltration, all the posts made in the game were focused on doing just that. It's not a meandering chat game, while Sissy Fight's simple choice system encouraged it.
I liked how Casablanca's game design required social interaction in order to progress, but prefered Sissy Fight's ability to sustain conversations that didn't directly involve the game. It seemed like Casablanca's system was great for starting a relationship, and Sissy Fight's was great for allowing it to grow beyond the game world.
Comments
Nathaniel Anderson's Homework :
Social experiences; player-player interaction in games; must rely on the type of game. Some games are more conducive to certain types of communicating; a puzzle game like we played – Set—requires intense focus. Because talking (or interacting; gesturing or making noise) would distract from this focus, and cause a player to lose, the game mechanics at their core discourage a social experience in the game. The method wherewith social experience is utilized in this game is competitive or relative standing. Players engage to do better than other players. Otherwise, social interaction hampers performance and possibly detracts from the game experience.
There is a second category of games which use social interactions as an auxiliary to augment the game experience. I include World of Warcraft, Kingdom of Loathing, or even Puzzle Pirates in this category. Puzzle Pirates contains many mini-games which can be compared to Set in their mechanic. Nonetheless, Puzzle Pirates encourages social interaction like WoW or KoL—within the meta-game. Usually these games encourage social interaction by modeling their meta-game after a materialist reality. For instance, these games contain economies, career paths, and profitable missions. Competitive standing is encouraged with leaderboards which rate people on various criteria (often involving amount of money, items, experience.) Teaming is encouraged in missions on the principle that many are more powerful than one in accomplishing mission (and the friend-seeking dynamic that certain “types” complement other “types” when grouping.) Then there is mass perspective, nation states, and contributing to the game's fiction that motivates players to interact en mass. But often one can opt to be a “loner” in this game and still achieve materialist or skill-based success.
However, some games not only encourage social interaction, but demand it.
The third variety includes games for which social interaction is required in order for the game to progress, or else crucial to success in the game. For both, the team which can communicate best often performs the best. These games include Sissyfight, and Cranium.
These incorporate social interaction directly into the rules of the game. Indeed, Cranium cannot be played without interacting. Cranium relies on certain external communicable talents (drawing, acting, sculpting—found in varying amounts among players) to make the game interesting. Communicating a specific idea in a nonparallel way makes both the challenge and the fun.
Sissyfight demands social interaction differently. It is possible to avoid interacting, as Matt says, however, teaming up is a sure way to win— as it trumps all other strategies. Similar to the Mafia game we played on our first day of class, the game does not rely on coded rules, but more on the possibilities of homo economicus stuff (reasoning, bargaining, betraying) of teamwork. The game is balanced with actions and counter-actions. So a strategy is not a matter of a specified skillset (like mashing a button or identifying a pattern) Nor is it a matter of grouping and grinding. Instead, strategy is obvious and instantly available to everyone—but because of the effect of uncodable and “human” abstracts like trust and loyalty – very painfully and delightfully difficult to achieve.
In these games, there are fewer “rules” and more restrictions—delimiting ways in which people can communicate (Cranium: no drawing symbols, or speaking names. Sissyfight: no ICQ or AIM) to create simpler tropes for human interaction and amplify characteristics that are observed in sociology or economics (and we often ascribe the game’s funness to some quixotic human nature.) Time limits are necessary in this category of game to advance the game (or else reasoning would stall, progress would stop) Eventually, time limits accelerate communication so in the frantic rush before the last grain of sand drops, communication fails comically—so these add to the fun.
Posted by: Nathaniel Andy Anderson | September 10, 2007 4:26 PM
(I could not figure out how to post on the blog... I do not know very much about blogging. I signed up for TypeKey, but I do not have an account on the IMD blog. Plus, I have responded to Mike in a sentence.)
Social experiences; player-player interaction in games; must rely on the type of game. Some games are more conducive to certain types of communicating; a puzzle game like we played – Set—requires intense focus. Because talking (or interacting; gesturing or making noise) would distract from this focus, and cause a player to lose, the game mechanics at their core discourage a social experience in the game. The method wherewith social experience is utilized in this game is competitive or relative standing. Players engage to do better than other players. Otherwise, social interaction hampers performance and possibly detracts from the game experience.
There is a second category of games which use social interactions as an auxiliary to augment the game experience. I include World of Warcraft, Kingdom of Loathing, or even Puzzle Pirates in this category. Puzzle Pirates contains many mini-games which can be compared to Set in their mechanic. Nonetheless, Puzzle Pirates encourages social interaction like WoW or KoL—within the meta-game. Usually these games encourage social interaction by modeling their meta-game after a materialist reality. For instance, these games contain economies, career paths, and profitable missions. Competitive standing is encouraged with leaderboards which rate people on various criteria (often involving amount of money, items, experience.) Teaming is encouraged in missions on the principle that many are more powerful than one in accomplishing mission (and the friend-seeking dynamic that certain “types” complement other “types” when grouping.) Then there is mass perspective, nation states, and contributing to the game's fiction that motivates players to interact en mass. But often one can opt to be a “loner” in this game and still achieve materialist or skill-based success.
However, some games not only encourage social interaction, but demand it.
The third variety includes games for which social interaction is required in order for the game to progress, or else crucial to success in the game. For both, the team which can communicate best often performs the best. These games include Sissyfight, and Cranium.
These incorporate social interaction directly into the rules of the game. Indeed, Cranium cannot be played without interacting. Cranium relies on certain external communicable talents (drawing, acting, sculpting—found in varying amounts among players) to make the game interesting. Communicating a specific idea in a nonparallel way makes both the challenge and the fun.
Sissyfight demands social interaction differently. It is possible to avoid interacting, as Matt says, however, teaming up is a sure way to win— as it trumps all other strategies. Similar to the Mafia game we played on our first day of class, the game does not rely on coded rules, but more on the possibilities of homo economicus stuff (reasoning, bargaining, betraying) of teamwork. The game is balanced with actions and counter-actions. So a strategy is not a matter of a specified skillset (like mashing a button or identifying a pattern) Nor is it a matter of grouping and grinding. Instead, strategy is obvious and instantly available to everyone—but because of the effect of uncodable and “human” abstracts like trust and loyalty – very painfully and delightfully difficult to achieve.
In these games, there are fewer “rules” and more restrictions—delimiting ways in which people can communicate (Cranium: no drawing symbols, or speaking names. Sissyfight: no ICQ or AIM) to create simpler tropes for human interaction and amplify characteristics that are observed in sociology or economics (and we often ascribe the game’s funness to some quixotic human nature.) Time limits are necessary in this category of game to advance the game (or else reasoning would stall, progress would stop) Eventually, time limits accelerate communication so in the frantic rush before the last grain of sand drops, communication fails comically—so these add to the fun.
Posted by: Nathaniel Andy Anderson | September 10, 2007 4:28 PM