First I want to thank Picnic for the opportunity to join the conference for free. It was an impressive experience, and I heard many inspiring talks! Many of them were related to my work (on social network sites, privacy, social dilemma's,), like the keynotes by Charles Leadbeter and Clay Shirky, the talk by Genevieve Bell, or the session on the emerging real-time social web. So I could comment on a lot of presentations, but for now I will focus on the "games go social" special on Friday.
Games go social - thoughts from a non-gamer
I am a social psychologist and communication scientist, not a gamer. Even worse, I'm a member of this difficult to reach target group – female, 36, not really interested in competition. It's not that I never played a game - I used to play MUDs (multi-user dungeons) in the nineties, but I was the always-chatting cleric and not the top rank high-level player. I never played a MMPORG and I even did not recognize the first social games on Hyves as social – when I was asked to enter my name for the high score list this scared me off.
But I have a fair background in research on virtual communities – starting with my diploma thesis on MUDs in 1996 to research on social network sites (SNS) nowadays. My interest also turned more and more to the intersection of SNS with marketing and branding.
That’s what me brought to this session on social games. I heard some really inspiring and interesting talks. Kristian Segerstråle, the first speaker, gave a good introduction into the topic by stressing the factors that attract people to social games. Generating emotions, more specifically, generating social emotions, is the key to the success of social games. I also liked the metaphor of social networks as digital villages, providing inhabitants with some ambient awareness of what their weak ties are doing
The talk of Marko Orenios and Joost Bazelmans was also very valuable for me because it focused more concrete on branding within a community. At first, Marko explained how the development of social games and communities challenges game developers. The developer team has to change into a media team that is clearly consumer-oriented and not mainly focused on programming issues. The transition to larger customer-service departments was also mentioned in other talks and is interesting for me as a social scientist. I think game developers are pretty good in developing and programming games, but they would benefit from the knowledge of social scientists when it comes to keeping a community alive. I see potential for some fruitful collaboration here.
The second half of the talk showed a successful example of branding in a community. Red chocolate had integrated the Rabobank into the community go.supermodel.com in a meaningful way. The chat bot Yvette was well integrated; users learned something about banking, but had also fun and got some nice items. I was impressed by the quality of the evaluation study. I sometimes think non-academic researchers do not use adequate control groups and so on; but this is obviously not true!
Another talk that impressed me was the one by Tobias Berlin from Bigpoint. He dared to admit that some things go wrong and that it is not so easy to integrate features of SNS into game communities. More precisely, it may be technically easy, but it doesn't work in the context of games. He also pointed out some challenges - do companies really want to share their entire context with other games and communities, at the risk that players or users leave? So, this talk gave me some things to think about.
After all these inspiring talks, the panel discussion surprised me by starting with the question „what is a social community?“ This is exactly the same discussion we already had 10, 15 years ago when virtual communities came up! I’ve written about this question in my dissertation in 1999; and I was not the first. I just built on social psychological theories and the work of early Internet researchers. We know from social psychology that a shared topic is important; we also know that there are two types of attraction to groups: social identification and interpersonal attraction. Interpersonal attraction corresponds to friendships; social identification means identifying with the goal and common interest of the group. There is also a lot of research about the consequences of the two types of attraction. For example, social identification is more important if you want to prevent that members switch to another community if the most popular member does.
This doesn’t mean that nothing is new now. But instead of defining community over and over again (and ending up with similar definitions), it might be more useful to build on earlier work and use these terms to analyze the processes underlying social gaming. What does it mean to game with people in your social network? Not all friends on a SNS are “real” friends, so it would be wrong to equate games with SNS friends as only based on interpersonal attraction. It’s also not pure social identification, but some mixture. A closer analysis would be needed – with which SNS "friends" do people play games? Only with close friends or also with acquaintances? A better understanding of the social relationships and processes helps to create the optimal game. As Kristian showed on the success of "friends for sell", it's not mainly design, graphics and thousand options, but the social processes and evoked emotions that make a game successful.
To sum up, I did not only learn a lot about the newest trends in the gaming industry, but I also got some interesting ideas for further research! Thanks for this opportunity!
