Games Decisions

Social game design operates within the physical and mental constraints of the human animal, so it pays to understand these constraints and build them into our designs. -Decision Making and Flow Theory.

1. Friendships.
2. Dunbar's Layers.
3. Social Groups.

Friendship:

There are four key factors for friendship, these include: proximity, similarity, reciprocity and disclosure. If the factors listed are not met, the players are unlikely to become friends. As designers, we must build opportunities for consensual reciprocity that look like: opening, opportunity, response and acknowledgement. Common variations include escalation and rejection. At each stage, interactions take increasing time and effort, and involve richer communication. Almost every stage of these reciprocation loops involved consent. Each party must consent to both starting, continuing, and escalating the relationship.

Dunbar's Layers:

People organise their friendships by their one-to-one bonds. Social psychology has been studying these relationships for decades. Robin Dunbar said that humans can have up to 150 meaningful relationships. The smaller clusters of friends, known as Dunbar's layers, are organised into five categories. 

• 1.5 people: intimate couple or the individual.
• 5 people: intimate friends or family.
• 15 people: best friends.
• 50 people: good friends.
• 150 people: acquaintances. 

An ideal way to visualise Dunbar's Layers is as a network of connections. There are different ways to use egocentric networks to analysis an individuals relationships, eg: dyads, triads, strong ties, weak ties and super-connectors. In order to develop a better relationship we much have high trust and take take time to build it. On average, a best friend would be formed from >200 hours of socialising. They would also meet up once a month. 

Social Groups:

A social group is a set of individuals labeled as being in a group. There are three dominant perspectives on what makes a group and these include: social identity perspective, self-categorisation perspective and social cohesion perspective. Common groups sizes roughly align with Dunbar's Layers, but are not identical concepts. In order to have a successful group you must have trust, stability, shared goals and roles.

Visualisation of Dunbar’s Layers. (Source)

When designing a game, don't build a big world first, because then you are faced with the key problem of your world being large and empty full of 500+ groups where strangers don't have trust. Rather focus on defining social activities, mapping out group sizes and trust levels, building an appropriate social support system and scaling the activity based off quality and quantity of friends available. 

Use Dunbar's Layers to determine the level of collaboration your audience will support. I, myself, am not making a multiplayer game but reading this article did help me learn more about multiplayer games and game decisions that should be considered.