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Since I last wrote about “so­cial gam­ing”, my term for gam­ing as a medi­um for so­cial­iza­tion (as op­posed to gam­ing for the sake of gam­ing), my opin­ions on the topic have changed quite a bit. For clar­i­fi­ca­tion, I am still talk­ing about video gam­ing, and my goals are still more or less the same: to use video games as a medi­um or an ex­cuse, re­al­ly, to bring peo­ple to­geth­er and cre­ate so­cial bonds. Video games are al­ready quite suc­cess­ful at do­ing this- the aim is to make ex­plic­it this de­sired ef­fect and there­fore be able to op­ti­mize our gam­ing ac­tiv­i­ties to­ward this end.

What so­cial si­t­u­a­tions ac­tu­al­ly arise when you in­vite some friends over to “play some video games”? The most in­ter­est­ing sce­nar­io oc­curs when you have a mix of “hard­core” and “ca­su­al” gamers. For me, the strik­ing dif­fer­ence be­tween the­se groups of peo­ple is not gam­ing abil­i­ty (although the dif­fer­ence is sig­nif­i­cant) but rather the at­ti­tude that they take to­ward gam­ing. As I men­tioned above, hard­core gamers play the game pri­mar­i­ly to play the game. They are con­cerned with in-game achieve­ment: get­ting bet­ter scores, more kills, high­er APM, that sort of thing. Ca­su­al gamers pri­mar­i­ly see the game as a fo­cus for so­cial­iza­tion. The game it­self takes more of a back­ground role.

This caus­es some prob­lems for so­cial­iza­tion, of course. Hard­core gamers are often unaware that their com­pet­i­tive­ness makes games un-fun for non-com­pet­i­tive play­ers; in fact, com­pet­i­tive games are al­most built to be un-fun for poor play­ers. The ma­jor­i­ty of fun in Halo or Call of Du­ty comes from get­ting kills on other play­ers; if you can’t do that, run­ning around and dy­ing ev­ery few sec­onds could hard­ly be con­sid­ered to be fun. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, gamers who are too fo­cused on the game won’t be able to de­vote men­tal time to hold­ing con­ver­sa­tions (out­side the game) or other­wise so­cial­iz­ing with the par­ty.

One pos­si­ble “rem­e­dy” to this “prob­lem” is to en­cour­age peo­ple to play co-op games in­stead of pure­ly com­pet­i­tive ones. (It’s worth not­ing that this isn’t so much a so­cial prob­lem as it is my prob­lem. I could sidestep the is­sue en­tire­ly by not us­ing video games as a so­cial medi­um, but I think it’s an in­ter­est­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty and one wor­thy of study.) My newest ex­am­ple of a co-op game which en­cour­ages so­cial­iza­tion is Atom Zom­bie Smash­er, a po­ten­tial­ly co-op game about (what else?) killing zom­bies. Look for­ward to some anal­y­sis and anec­dotes about play­ing this game next time.

Last time I wrote about try­ing to find ca­su­al games for medi­um/large-group so­cial events. We can split mul­ti­play­er video gam­ing in­to a cou­ple of vague­ly-de­fined cat­e­gories; I’m go­ing to use the term “ca­su­al” or “so­cial gam­ing” to refer to medi­um-scale so­cial gath­er­ings that in­volve video gam­ing; hard­core gam­ing, of course, is all about the game; and we might per­haps call the last group “LAN par­ty gam­ing” to indi­cate a mid­dle ground be­tween ca­su­al gam­ing and su­per-in­tense gam­ing.

It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III. Read more…

My cur­rent ques­tion is this: why are there few (if any!) ca­su­al/par­ty mul­ti­play­er games for the PC? I’ve been look­ing around for games that might ap­peal to more than just me and my hard­core gam­ing friends, in a (per­haps vain) at­tempt to cre­ate so­cial gath­er­ings through video games/LAN par­ties. Be­cause ev­ery­one here at school has a com­put­er, and net­work­ing is al­ready very-well tak­en care of, it’s def­i­nite­ly very plau­si­ble. The on­ly things miss­ing now are the games. Read more…