Lecture 1 - What Makes Gaming Social?

The blog was posted by Nabeel Hyatt on May 23 2008.

Nabeel tries to find a reasonable definition for Social Gaming:
Just as social networking is a tag applied to just about anything community-related on the web, it is temping to lump every game that has chat or a shared leaderboard under the social gaming umbrella. But to do so muddies the water of a category that just may be the natural progression from social networking. While social networking is focused on connecting people together, we should expect the best of social gaming to be about creating and building relationships with those friends. Not every multiplayer game is a social game, and by looking at it this way we can see that social gaming has a lot more in common with Wii Sports, Rock Band and Monopoly than it does with single-player casual games like Bejeweled or Bloons.

Synchronousn social games are games you play over a long distance with or against others in competition. A typical and very popular game is Hold'em Poker. Related games are Kart Rider, World of Warcraft and Club Penguin.

To the contrary asynchronous social games turn the game mechanisms to lower stress levels and leave the gamer time to make well crafted decisions. From a behavioural perspective they much closer match the behavioural model of social networks.

Nabeel Hyatt stresses that both asynchronous and synchronous games are not at all competing against each other, as they follow completely different gaming models. He also claims that they have something in common that other games don't: A real world social resonance of their activities. In his opinion, social gaming holds a promise of letting us have a little fun together online in a meaningful way. It seems like he believes that gaming with each other, using social games has effect on our bonds with other real people.

I can confirm that online games do have an impact in the emotional sense not only for the self, but also for other gamers. Although I do not play any games online at all, except for the silly Aldi Marblemaster, my wife used to play asynchronous Browser games called "Die Staemme" ("Tribe"), which is about conquering unchartered land and "Grepolis", which is about conquering Greek isles in antiquity.

Over time my wife developed a sense of friendship with some of the gamers, especially those who joined her to fight off enemy tribes or to join forces and regain power over stronger individuals. Writing comments about the planning strategy and making future plans gave sense of a common understanding.

What she also experienced was that her sense of time did not work very well. She sometimes realised that it was two o'clock at night and she was still planning and collaborating.

The comment of Robert about Nabeel's blogpost explains best what my wife told me: Social interaction in social games particularly comes from the NEED to have someone else help you. In the chat channels you will usually find people advertising for help with a quest, help to have something made etc. It would not be the same game it is today if it weren’t for the necessity of other players to attain certain goals.

It definitely connects people, at least for the duration of a game.