Designing for emergent sociability in video games

Abstract

Today, video games are widely consumed online. Many prefer to play socially with live players. However, the gaming culture reaches beyond play sessions. New ways to consume games emerge often and being a member of a community has become an integral part of gaming. While games are more popular than ever, they have also grown complex. The increased demand for quality from the players combined with added technical complexity of games create pressure to look for new game design paradigms. One alternative to fixed game design found in most games is emergent design that shifts some of the responsibility over design from game developers to players. To date, research over emergent design has not been widespread and instructions to implementing it have been few and far between. This thesis considers the requirements for adopting emergent design focusing on emergent sociability and presents the changes in thinking that the paradigm shift from fixed to emergent design requires from both designer and player. The results suggest that shifting to emergent design significantly reduces the amount of work required from the game developer. However, this improvement comes at a price, as the developer loses some control over the narrative of their game.