Computer Science 282: Social Aspects of Games, Leisure, and Entertainment

Unit 4: Design and Application

Rubiks Cube. Courtesy Museum of Hartelpool. https://www.flickr.com/photos/hartlepool_museum/6856427200/

In this unit we will be looking at the broader effects of computer game playing on individuals—physically, ethically, and psychologically; and on society as a whole.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this unit you should be able to

• apply theories and models of social behaviour to the design of computer games.
• design a social game.
• reflect on the process of social game development.

Key Concepts

Your reflections should show an understanding of these concepts:

design principles, tools and environments, storyboarding, social modelling

Some Questions to Think About

• How does the design of a computer game affect the people using it?
• How does it influence the ways they interact with others?
• How can it build or destroy a community?
• What ethical decisions need to be made when designing a game?

Time

This unit is expected to take over 25% of the time allocated to the course. We think this means it would take something over 30 hours of work for an average student to get an average mark, but your mileage may be quite different.

Unit 4 Learning Journal Template

You may copy the following headings into your Unit 4 learning journal to make it easier to organize you work in this unit. This provides the required headings for the tasks to be completed to meet the minimum task requirements. You are both welcome and encouraged to create new subheadings and headings as needed.

Remember, the more evidence you supply of meeting the required outcomes, the more likely you will be to achieve success on this course, so don’t be afraid to add notes, comments, thoughts, and reflections that go beyond the basic requirements.

Task 1: Game Design Proposal

Task 2: Game Design and Rationale

• Mockup/description
• Rationale

Reflections on Unit 4

Resources

Introduction

This is not a course about writing games although the ideas you have been exploring will hopefully be of some value to those that wish to do so. However, in this unit, we will be asking you to design a social game, game-like system, or gamification of some other activity. The purpose is not to create a working social game but to think through the issues that are involved and the potential complexities in both the social dynamics of the game itself and in its effects on behaviour both within and beyond the game. Like the previous unit, although we do provide some new knowledge and ideas here that will help you with the task, this requires you to synthesize what you have already been studying.

For the rest of this unit, when we refer to the ”game” that you will be designing, you may take it to mean not just a conventional game but any game-like system or gamification of another system, as long as it incorporates a social element. For example, as well as conventional games, we would be happy for you to design part of a virtual world (e.g., Second Life, the Sims, etc.), a gamified course or lesson design, or a social site incorporating game-like elements (e.g., a badge-based system, a social rating system like “Hot or Not”). If you are not sure whether your idea fits with this broad definition, ask your tutor for guidance.

Note that we do not require you to actually build the game although those with a hankering to do so are very welcome to turn this into a product, and some students may find it easier to actually construct a working game or prototype than to simply sketch a mockup. It is up to you, and it depends on your existing skills, interests, and aspirations whether you go that far.

We will not be assessing your technical development skills, nor your artistic ability (as long as you convey your meaning clearly)—this is all about the design and the reasoning behind it. Should you decide to implement it, beware that your work will be judged using exactly the same criteria as everyone else’s so it doesn’t matter how technically proficient you are, it is the design and reasoning that gets the marks. It can be a little too tempting to get caught up in technical complexities and lose sight of the point of this task, so do tread carefully if you are thinking of implementing any of this.

Through this process we hope that you will have to use the intellectual tools that you have been developing and learning about throughout the course so far. This is a creative process that will require you to make connections between different ideas, reflect in a different way on what they mean to you, and engage in some deep thinking about the nature of social behaviour as it relates to the field of gaming.

Task 1: Game Design Proposal (5–6 hr)

With tutor approval, you will design an online game, environment, or application that derives from and can be described using work done in the previous units.

You are encouraged to be creative in your choice of project, as long as it enables you to show how the outcomes for this unit have been well met. It may be a game or a mod of a game. It may be explicitly social, or it may be intended to bring about a particular social effect. It would, for example, be acceptable though perhaps a little unadventurous to design a game in which the only social interaction was through a high-score hall of fame. We are hoping you will go further than that or, at least, that you can provide a very good line of reasoning around how such a social game might have value. It may be a gamification of a different kind of pursuit. It should be a game (or similar) that you would like to play. If you are not sure whether your idea is suitable, then your tutor is there to help provide feedback and assistance.

We would like you to write your proposal in your Unit 4 learning journal, under the heading “Task 1: Proposal.” Your initial proposal should briefly describe what you intend to do in one or two paragraphs. This description should give the reader a reasonable idea of what the game is about and the main genre(s) it belongs to. You are welcome to describe it by comparing it with similar games if you wish.

In addition, you should clearly indicate which theories or models you are making use of and how you intend to make use of them. Note that it is likely you will adapt and change this as you proceed with the project, as you make new connections and see how different ideas apply. That’s part of the reason for doing this.

Once you have come up with a proposal, post it on the Landing and submit a link to that post on the Project link in Moodle. We ask you to submit this through Moodle as a formal signal that you are ready to have your idea evaluated by your tutor. Your tutor will provide a response, normally within five working days, either approving your proposal or suggesting modifications. The most common reason that modifications will be requested will be either that you are taking on too much or you are taking on too little to meet the outcomes effectively.

While you are waiting for feedback, please continue to think about your game, learn to use the tools and techniques you will need, such as storyboarding, diagramming and process design. We provide a list of links to appropriate resources to help you with this process, and you can use search engines or Landing group bookmarks to find things that will help. If you find any good resources, as always, share them in the course group “Game design resources” folder.

Task 2: Game Design and Rationale (20+ hr)

Once you have received feedback, start the design process, keeping a careful log of what you have done, issues you have faced, and learning you have experienced. In this unit more than any other, reflections will play a crucial role in both the learning experience and your marks. See “Some Help with Designing Your Application” for some assistance with this process.

The most important aspect of this activity is the write-up, not the design itself. In the write-up, you should explain your design decisions, describe the expected behaviour of people in the game, and give reasons that you think they would behave that way, backed up by research. This research can and should draw on work done in previous units, but feel free to do further research as your work progresses.

In More Detail

Explain how the environment/application relates to your previous work and what it is intended to achieve, paying particular attention to the specific needs of the community or communities that might use it. It is vitally important that the points highlighted in this commentary are reflected in your design.

1. Create a mockup and/or description of your application. This can be as simple as a few scanned or photographed sketches or a textual description of the game, or as complex as a working mockup.

   You may use mockup tools or diagramming applications if you wish. The precise format that you use will depend to some extent on the kind of application you have chosen to design. You will need to embed your file(s) in your wiki page for this unit—use the Embed option in the editor for this.

2. Explain your environment/application in terms of the theories and models that relate to it, comparing and contrasting your application with others to both highlight the similarities and draw attention to what makes your application distinctive.

   We are particularly interested in the problems that your application addresses, how it addresses them, and why you think your solutions should work. Your report should cover (at the very least)

   • the theories, ideas, models, and principles you are using.
   • the reasons that people would want to play it and the target audience at which it is aimed.
   • the ways that they might interact within and around the game, and how the game is designed to influence this behaviour.
   • The ethical implications of your game—how it might influence behaviour both to others within the game and beyond the game.

Present your report in your Unit 4 learning journal, under the heading of “Task 2: Game Design and Rationale,” using as many subheadings as necessary but at least distinguishing the mockup/game description and the report on the thinking processes/rationale behind it. This will be a substantial piece of work that may cover many printed pages, including diagrams, etc.

We expect that you will produce a minimum of six printed pages of work for this, but it may be more, depending on the approach that you take to describing and explaining your game.

Some Help with Designing Your Application

In process terms, we expect you to use appropriate techniques for the kind of game that you are designing. This will depend on the kind of game or game-like system you are creating.

One of the most effective techniques that can be used in the design of many games is story-boarding. A storyboard is a bit like a comic strip, showing images (these can be very rough, and you do not have to be an artist) of the game in progress, linked together by arrows showing alternative paths through the game. This approach would be most useful in games with a large graphical element, virtual reality games, and so on.

For some games, you may find it appropriate to describe the algorithms and processes used with abstract notation. If you are familiar with UML (Unified Modeling Language), this provides a set of diagramming conventions to use. This kind of documentation would be needed when, for instance, there are complex rules used to determine scoring or progress through a game.

For some games, a textual description of the game may make up much of the design documentation. This would be appropriate for things like MUDs and MOOs, for example.

Game of Marbles, 1919. Courtesy UA Archives | Upper Arlington Heights. https://www.flickr.com/photos/uaarchives/4974606700/

Background Framework

The following discussion of issues, comments, and questions is intended to help you make design decisions about social games or game-like systems that you may be building and configuring, whether they be games, sites incorporating social features, augmented reality applications, or whatever. The items discussed are intended as food for thought, not as prescriptive tasks to perform. They are things that you may need to think about when designing your game beyond issues of gameplay, rules, and look and feel.

Social games are inherently soft systems. That means that they are not simply composed of bytes but of the people who use them, their purposes, their epistemologies, their rules and regulations, their ethical norms, their hopes, their motivations, and the rest of the broad and interlocking systems of which they are a part. Identical pieces of software can be enacted in myriad different ways, so the design of the software is only a part of the design of the whole.

Each instance of the same software, be it a social game, Facebook group, or WordPress site, is a part of a different social machine. When thinking about designs of such systems, you must take into account not only the structural and process support of the software environment but the behaviours of individuals and the effects of mutual interactions that are overlaid on top of that.

You also need to think how your system, including the formal and informal processes and rules that it uses and the way it is configured and presented, will affect those behaviours. Note that when I use the word system, I am talking about the whole system that you are building, the environment and all the people in it, including the results of people within it making changes, the rules, the processes, its relationship with other systems and with the overall context within which it lies.

The following areas of concern are deeply interwoven, often overlapping and interdependent. Changing a part of one will often have an effect on many others. Not all will have equal relevance to all systems, but most need to be considered for most systems.

Purpose

Why are you designing this system? Who is it for? What is it supposed to do? What makes it distinctive? Compare and contrast your system with others that might achieve the same thing. If it is a system to support dialogue or sharing, then it is often fruitful to think about the ways that it differs from email. It can be helpful to make use of personas (rich descriptions, typically with pictures and brief life histories) of individuals that might be typical users of your system in order to imaginatively shift your perspective to think about how other people might use and interact with the system. These personas can be included in your documentation to demonstrate a thorough approach to analysis of needs.

Culture and Demographics

What is the culture or cultures of the community or communities to which you are trying to appeal? What kind of values might be shared? What might your community or communities find unappealing? Are they likely to be individualists, or will they be more interested in the collective interests of the community? Are there specific demographics—age, gender, interest, country of origin, class, occupation, belief, or other grouping that they might be expected to share? What expectations and norms come with those demographics? Again, personas and scenarios can help to provide a rich variety of perspectives to help you better understand the people that your system will serve.

Participation in System Design

Some systems are driven by the demands and needs of their users and are designed or evolve accordingly, with deliberate active participative involvement of all or some of the users in establishing features, design, and processes. Other systems are provided for their users by someone or some group that believes they know what users want, often making use of users as research subjects, typically by observation, interview, questionnaire, or focus group. Many are somewhere between: a system that has no feedback mechanism to discover and accommodate user needs tends not to last long, so larger systems often have user groups, formal or informal, that help to guide their development.

Do you have processes for user involvement in the development of the system? How are decisions made in the event of conflict? To what extent do users determine what the system is and does? Are there ways to involve everyone? How do you ensure fair representation of all users? Are some groups more important than others? Beware domination by any particular group unless these are the primary users of the system.

Growth

Getting social systems started can be a problem. How do you anticipate growth occurring? Will you be able to build network effects that are self-reinforcing? Will a lot of people arrive at once? Will you kick-start the system by importing people and contacts from elsewhere? Will you make use of existing social networks, and, if so, which one would be most useful? Which might be positively antagonistic? Note that, sometimes, slow growth of a pool of passionate users can be a lot better than mass import: it can seem a lot worse if there is little activity if there are thousands of people there than if there are just a few, which will drive people away.

Size and Scalability

Related to the issue of growth is the issue of scalability. More is different. A social system such as a game that works well with 15 people will probably work badly with 15 million, and vice versa. Typically, as a system grows, there will be a need to parcellate and divide it to sustain relevance and usability, but an over-parcellated system will feel like a ghost town very quickly if it shrinks.

Some issues are simply technical: network connections, disk space, processing, clustering, and memory capacity are important issues to consider when designing a system that may grow. Most of the big issues are less technical. Issues to consider include interface design, system organization, filtering, roles, sub-divisions, user management, group management, and so on. How big do you expect your system to be? What features and structures does it need to support the numbers you envisage? How will it change and adapt as the size changes?

Rewards

There has to be some value in your system to the people that use it. What will people get out of it? What are the personal rewards? Is social capital a reward in your system? Think about this at both a general level and at a task level. Why would someone use a particular feature?

Gamification versus intrinsic merits—note that self-determination theory shows that extrinsic motivation is often detrimental to intrinsic motivation, so be careful that any rewards like points, likes, plus-ones, and karma are deeply integrated with the purpose of the system and do not become an end in themselves. Sometimes rewards are intrinsic to the purpose of the game. Sometimes they are not. Think carefully about what behaviours you are encouraging with a particular reward system. Remember that rewards may not be visible—completing a puzzle or a mission, for instance, may be reward enough in itself.

Social Capital, Recognition, and Reputation

There are many ways that we define ourselves and see intrinsic value in the connections that we have and make with others. Our openness to helping others often gets repaid in full from the help that others give to us. How does your system allow people to use and gain social capital? Is there existing social capital that might be used, e.g., from other networks, existing groups, societal roles, etc? How can people help one another? How can they gain reputation? Do you have ways of making this more visible? Things like halls of fame, opportunities to help others, metagame activities, badges, privileges, and more can help to make this more tangible, as long as care is taken that the rewards are directly correlated with the things that constitute success in the system.

Help and Information

Sometimes the biggest reward of using a system is simply to receive help when needed. Building a system that offers such help and making the giving of such help an integral and easy part of using it can be very effective. Can your system provide help? How does it support people finding the right kind of people and/or information? What kind of help does the system (including the people in it) provide? This may be part of the metagame, or it may be embedded in the game itself.

Engagement and Friendship

A system that facilitates engagement and interaction with others, both in building relationships and sustaining them, can provide a very good reason for staying on it. How does your system support the development and/or sustenance of friendships or other kinds of relationship? Does it allow things like private dialogues, formation of circles or groups, sharing of things?

Place

Some games and game-like systems revolve around places. When building a system, it is important to ask whether it relates to one or more locations in particular. If so, it is important to remember that the system is therefore a support that will likely be dwarfed in significance by physical interactions. If it is tied to a place (or places), are there ways of using that place to support the system, for example, QR-codes, kiosks, local wifi networks, etc.? Can you make use of geolocation? How about augmented reality?

Interest

In some social systems, the topic of interest may be valued more highly than people in the community that surrounds it. This is particularly true on larger and more anonymous systems. How will your system support such interests? What kind of taxonomies might be useful? Can the users themselves contribute to such taxonomies (e.g., by tagging)? Is it worth spending effort on building a community or a network in such a system? If so, what is the value? If the cohesion of the network or group helps to spread knowledge, sustain engagement, and allow ideas to spread, then it may support the user’s interest in the initial topic better. Are there artifacts such as files, links, game objects, or other physical tokens that can support such interests?

Time

Some systems are focused on particular events. It is important to be aware of these, including regular ones (terms, holidays, celebrations, etc.), and those that may be more specific (conferences, meetings, etc.). Note that systems may be built to support arranging and facilitating such events. In real-time gaming systems, it can be very important to ensure that the right people are there at the right time.

Pace

The rate of engagement and the patterns of rates of engagement over time can be hugely important to a social system’s development and design, especially in things like real-time games. How bursty is the interaction? Are there likely to be peaks and troughs? At what kind of time scale? Is it necessary to help sustain the pace, or is it okay for it to ebb and flow? Are real-time interactions valuable? A system that assumes a particular single pace may suffer if and when the pace varies. How do you cope with changes in pace? Does the system work equally well when there are (say) hundreds of messages or other interactions a minute as when there are days or weeks between them? Are there ways to change or drive the pace?

Duration

Not all social systems are designed to operate for all eternity. Is there a natural start and end to your system? If so, what signals the start and end? How are people recruited to the system in a timely manner? Does support for the lifecycle of the system need to be developed? Is there a natural lifecycle for people using the system? For example, a game or community to support one might cease to have relevance when the game or level or mission is completed; a teaching and learning site may have no continuing value once something has been learned or a course completed.

Are there ways to retain users when the original value of the system for them is used up? For instance, might there be ways to encourage expert players to help newbies? Can levels overlap? If there are individual lifecycles where experience gained is valuable, it can be useful to find ways to hold onto those with such experience to help and guide those who are at an earlier point in the lifecycle.

Scales and Granularity

Many social systems operate at multiple temporal, spatial, ontological, and social scales. For instance, topics may spawn sub-topics, some subjects or activities may be fast, and others may be slow. Real-time games assume a certain pace of change, while turn-based systems may not. Some locative systems relate to a confined space, others to a broader geographical region, and people may identify differently with different scales of space. Groups may contain subgroups.

Often, larger-scale, slower changing patterns may determine smaller scale, faster-changing patterns more than vice versa. For instance, for a system that operates a hierarchical structure of categories, the top-level categories will play a far greater role in determining the course of events and users’ behaviours than those at the bottom of the hierarchy. At what scales does your system operate, and what support does it offer for such scaling? Do things change at different levels of granularity? How do relative scales change over time?

Evolution and Adaptation

All but the most ephemeral social systems evolve to some extent, as norms develop, people come and go, needs change, and so on. This tends to be especially true at the start, but change continues in almost all systems. This is related to issues of growth and scale, as well as parcellation and collective behaviours emerging from multiple interactions of people and the objects they create.

How does your system support change? What processes and methods are in place to allow it to adapt as people join, people leave, people progress? Remember that these often include soft human processes as well as tools. Evolution is concerned with adaptation and often relates to the survival of the fittest. What makes the parts of your system—be it a tool, a process, a group, a norm, or whatever—fit? How does each part relate to others? For instance, does a particular tool or sub-community thrive at the expense of another? What criteria determine its survival? Is this a designed process, an emergent process, or a combination of the two?

Identity

We both form our identities to suit the social systems we inhabit, and those systems help to form our identities. Some communities are deeply entangled with our sense of who we are—religious communities, sports fans, music lovers, etc. Some communities encourage or tolerate the use of alternative identities or sock puppets. This is notably often a feature of games and game-like systems and may provide a good part of the motivation for playing in the first place: we sometimes like to pretend to be someone we are not.

How are people represented on your system? What role do identities play in forming the system? What aspects of individual identity are relevant to the community? What roles might people play? Will they ever need to be anonymous? Do you and/or others in the system need to know who people really are? Can people take on multiple identities? Will they take on alternate identities? How will the system support building and sustaining their own sense of identity?

Context

Every system exists in a context and, within a system, people may find themselves using it in more than one context. This can include, but is not limited to

• the existing social context—roles, expectations, relationships that are brought to the system. We do not always want to share the same things in the same way with the same people.
• the temporal context—shifting patterns and needs that change at different intervals, such as (for example) shifts between one course and the next at a college or university, shifts between projects, shifts from formal to informal contexts, shifts from one level in a game to the next. People need different things, different sets of people, different functionality, at different times. This relates not only to the interface presented to the user but also to how the user relates to the rest of the world. Many real-time systems acknowledge this by providing a means to show status, but the principle can apply to any social interaction.
• the technical context—what are the limitations of the technologies used; what other technologies are used, especially for social interaction and engagement? What technologies does the system rely on?

How does your system support and relate to different contexts? Is it possible to shift between them? Do they change as a matter of course? Can people control the context they are in?

Mob and Network Effects

A social system usually leads to some emergent effects, patterns, and processes that result from the effects of interactions between many people. In a closed community, groupthink (for better or worse) is likely to emerge. If you do not want that, how do you build diversity or parcellate the social landscape to limit the effects? If you do want that, how do you encourage and sustain group thinking?

Stigmergy, behaviour that emerges in a group through signs left in the environment (e.g,. forest footpaths, termite mounds, movements of money markets), can lead to large-scale behaviours that affect and are affected by the behaviour of individuals. How can you take advantage of stigmergy to provide group intelligence without suffering from problems like the Matthew Effect (the rich get richer), preferential attachment (patterns persist), and filter bubbles (those patterns increasingly limit diversity)? What stigmergic effects naturally occur in your system (e.g., people tend to be drawn to areas of activity and crowds, tend to avoid places that are quieter)?

Network effects, whether through direct connection to others or mediated through objects, can be useful or a nuisance. They can be encouraged or discouraged, depending on system design. Social networking sites, for example, often recommend new people to connect with based on existing links with others and their links to others, thus encouraging growth and consequently greater use and usefulness of the system, following Metcalfe’s Law that the value of a network is proportional to the number of nodes squared (minus one).

However, a network that is too broad can result in issues of privacy, excessive messages, poorly defined context, and loss of value. How does your system encourage positive growth while avoiding the risks of excessive linking? Are there ways to differentiate the kinds of connection that are made? Access controls? Filtering tools? Are there visual ways of establishing affiliations, like uniforms, badges, or labels?

Social Forms and Structures

Implicitly or explicitly, your system will naturally mould itself to one or more social forms. These can range from small closed cliques to broad open networks, from communities of interest or place—where the interest or place matters more than the community, to communities of practice, where shared norms, knowledge, and interests bind people who may have no other common bonds. They may be tribes, with broad binding characteristics and rules, or simply crowds, milling and connecting. And, of course, they might be networks of friends or family or coworkers.

Different forms have different needs—roles and hierarchies are common in smaller groups and larger tribal forms, and should probably be reflected in similar technical features in a software system, whereas they are anathema in loose networks of friends of communities of practice, where more open sharing with individual control over the scope of who sees what are more useful.

Group and tribal forms often involve rites of passage, transitions between one role and another, or simple recognition of length of membership. How will that happen in your system, if at all? Some social forms involve rituals for joining and leaving—how will your system support those? Will your system be open? How will you limit membership, if at all? Will all people on the system have similar rights? If not, how will you determine their rights? Will it be possible to kick people out of guilds, clans, tribes, or groups? If so, who will do it?

Forms of Engagement

Different social structures tend to result in different ways of interacting. Does your system encourage competition? This might include anything from support for arguments to gaining likes or user points, from competition for space or attention to competition for prizes. Does your system support ways of working together collaboratively with a single goal? Does it provide ways that individual sharing benefits others (cooperation)? Forms of engagement often correlate closely with social forms that a system supports, and may help to determine the amount of social presence, activity, and mutual support that are possible.

Privacy and Disclosure

What control will you give to people over what they reveal and to whom? How far will you extend this? It is necessary to think about this in terms of profiles, individual fields, interactions, making and breaking relationships, ratings, posts, comments, personal visibility, etc. It is also worth thinking about how people to whom access is granted are divided.

Will this be by generic role, or by specified individuals or groups of individuals, or both? It is also important to think about general policies and other non-digital technology issues such as legal requirements, ethical concerns, and the need to build reputations and trust. Remember that different identities may be a part of the game, and role playing may be important. On the other hand, think about the need (or not) for consistency.

Trust

What mechanisms do you provide for trust building and how (if at all) will trust evolve in this system? Do you offer support for asserting trust, e.g., through recommendations of others or through reified histories of activities? Are there pre-existing mechanisms for trust, such as innate social hierarchies, accreditation, gamer status in another game, and so on? How does your system allow individuals to build relationships or reify activities to help build a reputation for trustworthiness?

Wheelbarrow race during a surf carnival, Sydney. Courtesy Australian National Maritime Museum on the Commons. https://www.flickr.com/photos/anmm_thecommons/7654572352/

Contracts

Informal and formal contracts are common in social systems. Is there a need for explicit guides or rules for behaviour? How do you develop them? Who is involved? What social norms and mores may develop, and how will the system assist or inhibit these? What existing laws and contracts apply? How do you assure conformity? Do you need to? How do you deal with those that break informal or formal contracts? What about those who grief others or break the rules of the game?

Governance and Hierarchies

Most systems have at least some separation of roles, if only to allow someone to administer the system and make high-level changes to the structure and processes of the system. Who is in control? What role do administrators have? Are there formal leader, editor, or similar roles? Are there any roles at all? If not, how can the system be made safe, secure, and trustworthy? (Hint: individual access control settings.) Do the roles reflect real-life roles?

Judgement and Punishment

What kinds of transgression are possible? How does the system deal with transgressors? Are there formal systems in place such as rules or contracts? Who judges? Consider ways to involve different community members in policing or judging transgressions. Try to avoid making these the same person.

Parcellation and Diversity

Many social spaces, especially those supporting diverse communities, are subdivided. This both accommodates diversity and enables diverse uses to thrive. Subdivisions may involve things like groups, topic areas, clusters in networks, clans, guilds, areas, rooms, battlefields and so on. This can work both for and against a system. If it is too parcellated, then there may be insufficient interest or momentum to sustain the pieces; things may be hard to find; communication may be difficult; knowledge may be isolated; and repetition may occur often. If it is not parcellated enough, then things can appear chaotic; it can be hard to find relevant people and information; issues can arise due to diverse needs and conflicts; and people may be driven away by excessive activity. Worse effects, like the swamping of interesting diverse niches by a bland majority taste, can occur.

To what extent is the space subdivided and to what extent is traffic allowed or encouraged between subdivisions? Do different parts of the system operate at a different pace? Are some more important than others? Are there different interests, social norms, scales? Should the system be separated to support diversity, or is it better that everything and everyone get muddled together? How will the system cope when activity levels or numbers within niches change?

Control

Controllable spaces are motivating spaces. This means giving people choices. Such choices might relate to interaction, interface, selection of features, views of objects, rules, processes, and so on. Note that choice is not the same thing as control. Too many choices can be as bad as too few, unless it is easy to choose between them and easy to enact those choices.

What are the important things for users to control in the system? What can be done on their behalf by the system? You need to think about the increased complexity of giving more choices versus the loss of control that occurs when giving fewer. What are the choices that matter? How can you find that out? How easy is it to change?

Social Objects

What kind of objects will people create and interact with in your system? Things like game objects, badges, messages, weapons, blog posts, files, forums, wikis, photos, and so on are typically the glue that holds a system together and that make interaction possible. What kind of objects will your users need or create? How will they embody the collective intelligence of the community? How will they be found, organized, and linked together? Can the users do that or will there be a predetermined structure (categories, hierarchies, networks, etc)? Why?

Openness

Open systems are great for encouraging growth and making it easy for people to join, but typically there will be costs in terms of commitment, fear of disclosure, trust, and community cohesion.

Can anyone join? What rites of passage, barriers to entry, means of approval will you employ? Will social objects and people be visible beyond the system? Will people be allowed to control visibility? What granularity will you allow for showing and hiding things? Will people be able to move their data out of the system? How open will the system be to other systems?

Ownership

Part of feeling a sense of control is related to feeling a sense of ownership. Many game-like systems and more than a few games are characterized by a strong sense of belonging and control over the environment—think in particular of things that involve building, like The Sims or Second Life, as well as spaces where objects are gained or exchanged as part of the way they work, such as Grand Theft Auto or most MMORPGs.

Who owns the system and the objects created on it? Do you need to make that explicit? How will you deal with shared ownership and copyright? How can you encourage a sense of ownership? Do you need to do so? What stands in the way of achieving a sense of ownership? Note that top-down changes without the involvement and assent of users is a sure-fire way to take away both a sense of control and a sense of ownership, as is anything that changes or removes content created by individuals.

Ethics

Can people using your system do harm to others within the system? If so, how? Is it part of the gameplay? Can harm be caused apart from what the rules allow? Does your system embody beliefs about how people behave in general? Does it encourage or discourage some forms of behaviour? Why? How will your system promote or discourage different forms of behaviour to others? Will it affect how they behave outside the system? Can they use the system to do bad things to people outside the system? How will your system deal with conflicts and ethical dilemmas where different ethical demands conflict with one another?

Distributed Cognition

Most social systems may be seen as an embodiment of a kind of group mind or collective intelligence. Systems, not just the parts within them, do things. Systems also embody distributed knowledge and skill within them. Some of that knowledge will be made visible by people sharing and communicating, some of it will be embedded in the tools, processes, and structures that you develop. For example, when you create a tool for blogging or a categorization or tagging system, you are shaping the space to make certain kinds of knowledge visible while embedding your own preconceptions about what may be of value.

If you make it simple to post a message, what are the decisions you are making on behalf of the user? What are you taking away from them, and what are you making easier? If you allow simple tags you are cajoling people into making binary classifications of things: is that useful? Those decisions you make are part of the distributed intelligence of the whole system. Poor decisions can make a system stupid as well as an intelligent one!

Some systems can deliberately or unintentionally make use of collective intelligence—collaborative filters, social tagging systems, and ratings-based recommender systems, for example. Sometimes these effects can emerge from how people interact with the system with no intentional programming support. For instance, memes can spread, groupthink patterns can emerge, and activity can spawn more activity, often leading to an emergent focus or filter bubble that no one particularly planned. Is that what you want to happen? Are there ways to encourage or prevent it?

Visual Look and Feel

For the most part, the appearance of the system is a little outside the scope of these principles. Usability and accessibility appropriate to the intended audience and use are of course crucial, and it is assumed that you will be designing an interface to match the needs of your users and the principles above.

There are many creative design decisions surrounding the interaction design and the appearance that can make or break a system, and many good resources that can help are available online or in book form. I will not be covering those here, or this would turn fairly rapidly into a long book.

There are some social aspects that do relate simply to appearance, however. Many of these relate to culture and demographics, and all involve generalizations and assumptions that may need refinement as the system evolves. Large graphically heavy systems with primary colours might appeal more to pre-school children than to a community of lawyers, for example. Programmers may find text-heavy, complex, and configurable interfaces to be very appealing, while fans of a teen band might not. Is your visual style appropriate to the intended audience? Can they change it? Beware the “MySpace” effect, though, where diversity of interface can lead to lack of continuity, separation of communities, and confusion for visitors.

Remember that these issues are intended as thinking tools, not as principles to follow or issues that must be addressed in every kind of game or game-like system. Your game or game-like system will be unique, a product of both your imagination and your knowledge of how social systems work. Whatever you do, do it for a reason, think about the consequences, and reflect on the process.

Three children playing a board game possibly on SS ORMISTON, 1927–1939. Courtesy Australian National Maritime Museum on the Commons. https://www.flickr.com/photos/anmm_thecommons/7586559554/

Final Reflections

As for every unit on this course, write a learning journal entry for this unit reflecting on the process. This will be a particularly important set of reflections in which you may be bringing in a range of ideas not only from this unit but from the course as a whole.

Do not skimp on this—the weighting for this reflection is a little higher than for the rest because we expect more depth and breadth. You may also find yourself reflecting on the entire course experience at this point.

We would normally expect at least one or two pages of reflection for this unit (when printed as single-spaced A4/letter text) and potentially more.

Optional Formative Feedback (1–2 hr)

If you would like to receive feedback on your work for this unit, submit a link to your page for the unit to your tutor via the Unit 4 Formative Assessment link on the Moodle home page . Your tutor will provide brief feedback and may make suggestions for improvement if needed.

Note that this carries no marks towards your final grade, and the tutor will not provide you with a grade for this at all. It is purely intended to help you to know how you are doing as part of the learning process.

Remember that, as always, it may take 5–10 working days for feedback to arrive (more if you are submitting this within around a day of another unit’s work), so do not leave this until the end of your contract!

Resources

As always, do seek further resources on the Landing and on the Web. If you find any that are useful, add them to the Landing. Remember that you can use the things you have shared (paying special attention to your comments and annotations) as evidence of having met one or more learning outcomes on the course.

Learning about Game Design

As you read through a selection of these articles, you will see some commonalities but also a lot of differences between different approaches. Choose one that works for you, and feel free to adapt it.

Bay, J. (2009, July 8). Designing games that don’t suck (Web log posting). Gamasutra. Retrieved from https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4072/designing_games_that_dont_suck.php
An article focusing on usability principles in tandem with a model of gameplay that is straightforward and easy to comprehend.

Joubert, R. (2009, August 31). Minimising game design. DevMag. Retrieved from http://devmag.org.za/2009/08/31/minimised-game-design-for-indies/
An article discussing “minimized game” design, discussing the pros and cons of designing very simple games. This is something that has become a lot more significant since the enormous growth in smartphone games.

Koster, R. (2010, October 12). The fundamentals of game design. Raph Koster’s Website. Retrieved from https://www.raphkoster.com/2010/10/12/the-fundamentals-of-game-design/
A short and straightforward article on game design, including the parts and the process.

Tajè, P. (2007, March 27). Gameplay deconstruction: Elements and layers. GameCareerGuide. Retrieved from https://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/355/gameplay_deconstruction_elements_.php
An article on gameplay deconstruction, describing a method for describing and understanding games, as well as building them. The notation is quite usable and relatively easy to understand, and the model of design may be helpful to you if you are having difficulties turning your ideas into practice.

http://gamedesigntools.blogspot.com/: An excellent blog and knowledge base about the process of designing games as well as a lot of tools and techniques. Much more than is needed for this exercise, but it is worth picking the parts that are relevant and useful.

http://tinygdtool.urustar.net/ Game Design Toolkit—actually a PDF file that can be printed and turned into a small booklet that takes you through a simple process of game design. This is a good, straightforward process that should help you if you are stuck for ideas and are not sure where to begin.

Tools for Building Games

For those wanting to turn their ideas into reality or who need something concrete to build upon, here are some links to sites that provide game design and creation tools.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/five-free-game-development-tools-make-your-own-games/: A list of five free tools for making games. Note that most of these are not suitable for making archetypal social games as such although social elements such as halls of fame may be included, or the games may be used as part of a broader social gaming system.

http://www.digital-tools-blog.com/list/83-game-design-tools: Links to an assortment of tools and systems for game development.

http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-game-making-tools/: A big list of game-making tools, as the name suggests. Well annotated and described, useful to help choose relevant tools.