Cooperative and Competitive Social Gaming Models

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 is Luca Rossi, who begins by highlighting the great diversity in computer gaming, and the substantial social aspects of shared gaming experiences. Indeed, creating sociable gaming experiences is now an important aim for the industry.

And yet, playing on Facebook also remains a solitary experience to some extent – you’re playing with others, perhaps, but at a distance. Friends in such games are positioned as resources, who variously can be played with or against. Social relationships are used as games resources, and it is possible that specific game structures work better with specific underlying social structures.

Competition-based games may be seen as bounding activities, strengthening in-group connections, while cooperation games can be seen as bridging activities working best with open groups. Luca examined the two social games Biggest Brain and Pet Society to test these assumptions.

Participation in Pet Society is based on invitations, while Biggest Brain participation is virally distributed. PS players are more active in inviting players, therefore, and even in adding new social network contacts in order to invite them to the game – the games dynamics encourage the enlargement of one’s social network, in other words.

Sharing game achievements is also interesting in this context: it is used to state one’s identity as a game player (in essence, to brag), and more prevalent in Biggest Brain – here, users remain within their existing network, with whom achievements are shared, rather than adding new network contacts. Biggest Brain, then, can be described as a bounding activity, while Pet Society is a bridging activity.

Finally, combinations of these two approaches may also be possible, following a ‘coopetition’ model. What kind of social behaviour does the sharing of competition and cooperation produce, though? Will we see new types of games that follow that model?