Interactions - November/December 2017

If I could wave a magic wand over our field, I would have our community decide that we will truly value quality, in-the-moment shared experience, and commit to using our expertise in the service of supporting it better. Then I’d have everyone study what great game designers already know and do to help make this happen.

We know social connection is important. Research has found correlations between social isolation and health concerns such as inflammation, altered immune systems and sleep patterns, cognitive decline in older adults, and risk of heart disease and stroke [ 1]. Social isolation is a risk factor for depression, and there is some evidence that it can increase vulnerability to addiction as well [ 2].

Humans evolved in situations in which most of our day was spent in the presence of community members and loved ones [ 2]—not getting this seems to contribute to unhealthy outcomes.

Are the technologies we’ve been building supporting us in forming quality social connections and having positive shared experiences? Social media use has exploded in the past 10 years, but there are some concerns about the long-term impacts of these platforms. For example, Jean Twenge’s piece in the The Atlantic points to abrupt changes in teen behavior patterns that she correlates with the rise of cell phone technology and social media [ 3]—teens are moving about independently in the world far less, socializing more online than in person, and are more likely to report depression than previous generations.

Twenge sees the loss of in-person connection and mutual exploration of the world as a problematic aspect of doing more socializing via social media.

Tristan Harris, former design ethicist
at Google, writes of myriad ways in
which technology subtly narrows social
encounters, for example by offering
limited menus of choices: “ ‘Who’s
free tonight to hang out?’ becomes a
menu of the most recent people who
texted us (who we could ping),” or by
turning looking for a companion into
a slot-machine-like interface such as
swiping left and right on Tinder [ 4]. In
building these applications and services,
we are doing some quite dramatic
experimentation with our own collective
connection with one another. Harris
argues that we’re not questioning these
design choices enough.

So what do games and play have to do with this? As someone with a foot in both HCI and games research, I can tell you that game designers have been building engaging and satisfying technology-enhanced shared experiences for a long time. If we include non-digital games in our reckoning, parlor games and board games extend the history of in-person engagement by hundreds of years. Present-day gamers report playing digital games with friends, family members, and spouses, and say games help them connect with friends and help their family spend time together (http:// bit.ly/2f D WM7g).

To give a mundane example of how
game designers have been ahead of the
curve on thinking through augmenting
quality in-person shared experience
with technology, consider console-based
gaming (e.g., Xbox or Playstation in the
living room). Game-console developers
created a model for sharing a screen
(the TV) and doing very involved
and enjoyable shared activities back
in the 1970s; these platforms have
been popular ever since. Players can
take fine-grained, interesting actions,
employ subtle strategies, and engage in
pleasurable shared experiences. Some
may object to the content of certain
gaming worlds, but it’s hard to argue
they don’t produce highly engaging and
pleasurable co-present shared activity.
One fundamental strength of the
game designer’s approach is rooted
in the premise that what they create
needs to be engaging in the moment.
The longer experience arc of any
game is made up of the myriad small
moments of gameplay—a player will
abandon a game pretty quickly if it’s
not experientially satisfying. So game
designers have developed frameworks
for understanding and shaping what they
build in ways that emphasize moment-
to-moment as well as overarching
felt experience. One example is the
mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics
(MDA) framework, in which game
designers use aesthetic end goals as
a compass to help them shape core
mechanics (actions that can be taken
in the game) and resulting dynamics
(emergent experiences that occur with
the combination of multiple layers of
mechanics). For example, an aesthetic
goal of fellowship “can be encouraged
by sharing information across certain
members of a session (a team) or
supplying winning conditions that are
more difficult to achieve alone (such as
capturing an enemy base)” [ 5]. MDA’s
creators offer strategies for extensive
tuning of mechanics and dynamics to
achieve target aesthetic goals.