A version of this first was posted as a thread on Twitter.
Social gaming has exploded this year, which isn't surprising given how many people have been stuck at home due to the pandemic. I know for me it's been a great way to stay in touch with friends. But why do games work so well as social experiences? I have a few thoughts on this.
First, the numbers for social gaming have been staggering. Roblox did 150M MAUs in July, Minecraft hit 131M in Oct. Nintendo has sold over 22M copies of Animal Crossing. Fortnite crossed 350M reg users. Among Us has seen more than 100M downloads and nearly 4M peak concurrent players. Social games were already becoming an enormous part of our lives, and Covid-19 just accelerated that trend.
Why have social games proven to be so good at maintaining friendships during this time? Because the prospect of doing something fun together draws us in, while the structured play of the game organizes and facilitates our social interactions. This is because all games, whether they're video games, board games, or sporting games, are by definition constructed situations with conventions for how to interact that sit apart from regular life.
What social games are able to do (and which virtual worlds that aren't games largely fail at) is to replace the anxiety of unstructured and unbounded social interactions with a highly structured scenario in which we literally have something to do and rules for how we do it. The game sets the stage for our interactions with others. When you play a social game there's typically no uncertainty about what you're doing in that shared space and there are rules to how you should interact. The game helps facilitate the act of being friends, so to speak. This isn't to say that abuse isn't a problem in online gaming -- it absolutely is. Every social game needs to very actively address this. And as social games become a primary place where many of us do our socializing it is critical that they be welcome spaces for everyone.
Social games work because they provide a space for what are often considered to be the four key elements needed for friendships to develop: Proximity, Frequency, Duration, and Intensity. Proximity makes it easier to see your friends and spend time with them. In real life friends tend to live close to each other, go to the same school, or work at the same place. Social games reproduce that proximity online, creating a space for people to engage with each other.
But proximity is not enough on its own. Friendship also needs both frequency and duration of interaction. It's tough to make a new friend or stay close with an old one if you only see or speak with them once or twice a year (which I can tell you as a 45-year-old, is something that can all too easily be the case as you start to get busy with your job and family). Social gaming can make it easier to increase both the frequency with which you interact with your friends (by offering an excuse to get together on a regular basis) and the duration of those interactions (because the games are fun to play it's easy to pass time quickly).
Gaming also can offer a key element of intensity to those relationships. Playing games together creates shared emotional moments, whether that's a Victory Royale with your Squad in Fortnite or figuring out who the imposter is in Among Us. It's not just that playing a game together online gives people a space to chat about their lives. It's also how the gameplay itself offers a mechanism for people to engage with one another in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise. When you play a game with someone, you have a shared goal. You have a shared sense of purpose. You have a shared emotional investment in the outcome of the game. You have a shared emotional investment in the other players. What gaming provides is a safe framework for inducing emotional intimacy that mirrors the emotional intensity of the games that are being played. Without games we often don’t have a structure for safely experiencing those kinds of emotions with others in our daily life.
It's also why "playing" often isn't the only thing happening in these games now. We're holding graduations in Minecraft, birthday parties in Animal Crossing, getting married in Rec Room, and watching movies together in Fortnite. Social games can help foster and strengthen our relationships so that we can have these kinds of experiences within the space of the game. None of this would be happening if the underlying games themselves weren't fun to play -- we need the magnet of compelling gameplay to draw us in -- but it turns out that the interactions that social games catalyze with our friends are often what we truly value.