In the last post, we looked at the definition of social sustainability as it relates to urban planning. But…

How does it work when applied to games?

Let’s look it as a metaphor. The ‘hard’ infrastructure is the system that allows the game to function on a basic level, the rules that the player must abide by in order to advance in the game. Just like the water, power, and other utilities for a town, the game cannot exist without this set of rules.

Similarly, the soft infrastructure of a game works in combination with the hard structure in order to make social experiences available. Just like the soft infrastructure isn’t a collection of buildings, but spaces like market squares and community centres and other conceptual places, in games the social infrastructure is created around the rules of the game, in the gap between regimented control and player agency.

In other words, the hard game infrastructure is the rules of the game. You can’t get around them. They’re inflexible, they hold the gameworld up, because they’re the rules that the developers made content for. In a single-player game, the hard infrastructure is almost all there is outside of community-made mods.

In those kinds of games, the soft structure is limited to the player’s interaction with the game. Ever jumped around, knocking crap off of shelves in Half-Life 2 when you got bored during a ‘non-cutscene’ cutscene? That’s about as good as it gets for single-player games.

It’s in multiplayer experiences that the soft infrastructure of games begins to appear. In World of Warcraft, when you meet your friends at an agreed-upon place in order to run a quest, you’re interacting with the social space. On Facebook, when you play Farmville and you help a neighbour with her crops, that’s the social infrastructure at work.

Social sustainability, then, is planning a game to encourage healthy social practices, in a similar vein to Hancock’s list:

  • The game should be designed well, with a set of rules and rewards that encourage the player without frustrating them.
  • It should be fair in its distribution of rewards.
  • It should be well-balanced, not preferring one type of player or strategy to another.
  • The rules should be challenging without being impossible, as in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow.
  • The game should be internally consistent in its lore while not being completely alien to the real world.
  • It should encourage social interaction between players; a game which isolates the player is not a very good multiplayer game. (This is why Second Life feels like a mausoleum. The ‘mechanics’ of the game don’t reward social interaction, so it’s left up to the players, resulting in acres of nightclubs.)
secondlife

Franz Kafka's World of Warcraft.

  • The developers and people in charge of maintaining the game should listen to the community and weigh their comments constructively to further the enjoyment of the game for everyone.
  • Finally, the game should be fun, linking the ruleset and the social space together in a way that makes the player want to keep playing, and makes their continued play healthy.

(This isn’t meant to be a definitive list – just what I feel Hancock’s list directly implies in games. If you feel that my list isn’t complete, or doesn’t work – please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.)

Social sustainability, in short, is respecting the players and allowing them to have input without impacting their ability to enjoy the game. By reinforcing the player’s grasp on the world and showing that the development team is listening to their playerbase, you establish a two-way relationship, that rewards the player’s investment of social capital (and money) with the feeling that their praise and complaints are being heard, restocking their social wallets.

The emerging social games sphere would seem like it would be best-suited to this kind of thing, right? As you’re playing Farmville, you’re interacting with your friends, you’re having fun, all in a social framework.

Nope. I actually think that Zynga’s games are the environmental equivalent of Exxon tankers more prone to leaks than a post-iceberg Titanic.

Bill Mooney’s talk at GDC is probably the most covered talk in the blogosphere (god, what a silly word) this past week, but I figured I’d take another stab at it. There’s just so much to dislike!

Outside of any talk, though, Zynga’s philosophy towards game design is pretty obviously unhealthy. Like drug dealers, they give an unwary Facebook user a taste of Farmville, but then, what’s this? The only way they can move forward in the game without devoting literally every second of their day to raising crops is by spending money. As David Hayward says, Zynga’s games “extract revenue and multiply users in every way possible.”

Nearly every event in FarmVille, from finding a cow to buying farm equipment, greets the user with a box asking them to publish the event on their wall. What does that say from a mechanical viewpoint? Even looking at it in those strict terms, the user’s reward for accomplishing a goal is to tell their friends about it.

Even the most unwary of players would see something amiss with that after a while. And their social capital reserves would go down. The FarmVille design philosophy, from a social infrastructure perspective, is pretty much to take as much as they can before the user gets sick and leaves. But by then there are hordes of new users to replace the old one and to spend more money, to be drained of social energy in the same way. It’s certainly a profitable strategy, as Zynga’s recent award for Best New Social Game at GDC 2010 shows.

But it’s definitely not a sustainable one.