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We are beginning to create a play community—not a forever community with a fixed code, but a temporary community with a code we make up as we go along, a community that we can continue creating anywhere, any time we find the people who want to create it with us.—Bernard DeKoven, "Creating the Play Community"
Introducing Social Play
The last few chapters have been a little bit lonely. In looking at experience, pleasure, and systems of representation, we emphasized an individual player's relationship to a game. It is, of course, important to consider each player as an individual: game designers need to make sure that every player who enters a game ends up having a meaningful experience, regardless of who else is playing. However, with this schema on Games as Social Play, we focus not just on the relationship between an individual player and a game, but also on the social experiences that occur when more than one player participates in the same game. The emphasis in the last few decades on single-player computer and video games is something of an anomaly in the eons-old history of gaming. While there are notable exceptions, such as solitaire card games, by and large over the centuries games have been valued as social experiences, as a way for people to relate to each other, as a way for people to play together.The fact that digital games are swinging back to favoring multiplayer experiences is not a new trend by any means: it is merely games returning to their roots as social play. As players mingle with each other inside the magic circle, their social interactions highlight important aspects of a game's design. Meaningful play can be framed as a social phenomena. Understanding how social play becomes meaningful, manifest both as interactions occurring within an individual game, and as interactions across larger play communities, is the focus of this chapter. This is not the first time we have discussed the interaction between players in a game. In Games as Game Theory Systems, for example, we explored the decision-making process of rational players within very specialized kinds of games. Even within the incredibly narrow constraints of game theory, the consideration of two-player strategies transformed simple choices into remarkably complex game problems. Now as we consider player interaction within the full gamut of social play, things get very tricky indeed.
