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.

It is for the first cat­e­go­ry, so­cial gam­ing, that I sug­gest a game to­day: Heroes of Might and Mag­ic III. It’s kind of an old game – it was re­leased in 1999, but the graph­ics cer­tain­ly don’t show it. If you look close­ly (and use the map ed­i­tor a lot), you’ll no­tice that an in­cred­i­ble amount of time was put in­to mak­ing the art­work for the game. Even at the measly 800×600 or what­ev­er res­o­lu­tion the game us­es, the forests and moun­tains and ev­ery­thing are in­cred­i­bly de­tailed.

What is most in­ter­est­ing about the game, how­ev­er, is its po­ten­tial for so­cial gam­ing to­day. It has two in­her­ent ad­van­tages. Old games tend to use disk space much more ef­fi­cient­ly (as a ne­ces­si­ty), and this one is no ex­cep­tion. The en­tire in­stalled foot­print of HoMM 3 Com­plete (the orig­i­nal and two ex­pan­sion packs) is on­ly about 300 MB. I can com­press this in­to an archive and put it on other com­put­ers, and get this – HoMM 3 al­lows you to join mul­ti­play­er games with­out hav­ing a CD in­sert­ed! You can copy this game to all your friends’ com­put­ers and have them join your game with ex­cep­tion­al ease. It’s sec­ond ad­van­tage is its turn-based na­ture: since you can­not do any­thing when it’s not your turn (be­sides look­ing around and in­spect­ing your al­lies’ heroes), there is a lot of room in-be­tween turns for con­ver­sa­tion and so­cial­iz­ing. It’s not nec­es­sary to be in a fren­zied, in­tense state the en­tire time one is play­ing this game.

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HoMM 3 games do take a long time to com­plete (on the order of many, many re­al-life hours), but mul­ti­play­er games can be saved and restart­ed at any time. Sav­ing is al­most in­stan­ta­neous and ba­si­cal­ly ef­fort­less. I have been try­ing it out with my friends, and HoMM 3 does in­deed make an ex­cel­lent so­cial game!

Un­for­tu­nate­ly, HoMM 3 is no longer pub­lished, but you can still buy HoMM 3 Com­plete (which works, very well, on Vis­ta!) very cheap­ly at some sites. It might be worth­while to pick one up soon, espe­cial­ly if you’re in­ter­est­ing in so­cial gam­ing, as I’m not sure you will even still be able to buy this game in a cou­ple of years.

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Cur­rent­ly, I play a fair amount of Call of Du­ty, which is an ex­cel­lent PC FPS. I prefer it over other mul­ti­play­er PC shoot­ers sim­ply be­cause I think CoD’s gun fir­ing sounds and an­i­ma­tions are much more grat­i­fy­ing. Okay, that’s a lit­tle ex­ag­ger­at­ed: Call of Du­ty is an in­cred­i­ble, pol­ished game with many very good ele­ments. Its mul­ti­play­er is ex­cel­lent when you’re play­ing on com­put­ers that al­ready have the game in­stalled, and with peo­ple that have played shoot­ers be­fore. With both the­se com­po­nents lack­ing, how­ev­er, Call of Du­ty is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive mul­ti­play­er ex­pe­ri­ence.

I’m cur­rent­ly look­ing for games that are easy to pick up, can be played in a very short amount of time, and have fair­ly small in­stal­la­tion foot­prints (or bet­ter yet, can be played from a CD or the net­work). Those qual­i­ties, in my opin­ion, will make a game that is much more ac­ces­si­ble than to­day’s games, and will turn video gam­ing in­to a much more in­clu­sive and ul­ti­mate­ly more so­cial­ly suc­cess­ful ac­tiv­i­ty.

Babo Vi­o­lent 2 comes close. It’s small and very, very sim­ple for a shooter. Ob­vi­ous­ly it doesn’t work with peo­ple who don’t en­joy shoot­ing other peo­ple, but it’s about as close to a “par­ty game” as I can think of for the PC. Game con­soles have it bet­ter in this re­spect: Mar­io Par­ty, for ex­am­ple, or DDR, or Gui­tar Hero (although those games have ac­quired some­thing of a hard­core cult sta­tus as well) are good ex­am­ples. I sup­pose I’ll just have to wait pa­tient­ly here for ca­su­al PC gam­ing to catch up and provide us with more ac­ces­si­ble par­ty games.