When games are framed as Social Play the relationships between elements in the game system are considered to be social relationships
Social play interactions may emerge in two different ways:
Interactions internally derived emerge from the functioning of game rules.
Interactions externally derived come from outside the magic circle.
A social play community occurs anytime a group of players get together to play a game. Play communities can arise around:
a single game
a game event or series of games
a larger game context
Player roles refer to the kinds of social relationships that exist between players in a game. Roles are not fixed and may change several times within the course of a game.
Sutton-Smith's model for player roles includes an actor, a counteractor, and an overall "motive" or format for play. For example, if the motive is capture, the actor's role is to take, while the role of the counteractor is to avoid being taken.
Bartle's model of player roles divides online MUD players into four categories:
Achievers: Players that seek to advance in experience and power.
Explorers: Players that want to explore the remote spaces of the world.
Socializers: Players that place a premium on direct social interaction.
Killers: "Antisocial" players that seek to harm and frustrate others.
Games are emergent social systems in which simple play behaviors and social interactions can result in incredibly complicated experiences of play.
A bounded play community is a closed system: it arises from the social play that takes place strictly within the space of an individual game. A play community that is not bounded is an open system, as there is an exchange between the game and its environment. Whether or not a play community is bounded or not bounded often depends on how it is framed.
The bounded play community of a game results in a form of social contract. The social contract:
emerges from the rules stylizing the ways that players interact with each other in the game
consists of the meanings and values which the players give life through play
ensures that play spaces are "safe" spaces where players can take risks with fewer consequences than in the real world
Safety and trust are two elements of the social contract of the game. They are also requisite psychological qualities that players must feel in order to be comfortable enough to enter into the social space of the game.
Piaget argues that when a child acquires an understanding of a game's rules, he is also developing an understanding of the social contract of a game. As children develop, they learn to see rules as flexible structures that can be altered through collective consensus.
In transformative social play players extend, transform, and manipulate existing social relationships through play itself.
Players make a distinction between "ideal" and "real" rules. Ideal rules refer to the "official" regulations of a game. Real rules are the codes and conventions held by a community of players. Real rules reflect a consensus of how the game ought to be played.
Players often broker social power by asserting competing sets of real rules.This is the phenomena of gaming the game, when players don't merely play within the game, but play with interpretations of rules and propose their own play variants.
Games permit and often encourage normally taboo behavior, the phenomenon of forbidden play. Forbidden play rebels against both the implicit rules of game play and against larger social values. The rules of a game both permit and put limits on forbidden play.
Metagaming refers to the relationship of a game to elements outside of the game. Garfield's model of the metagame includes four categories:
What a player brings to a game
What a player takes from a game
What happens between games
What happens during a game other than the game itself
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