Someone else's lightly-structured thoughts (Criticism)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Sunday, July 24, 2022, 11:33 (890 days ago) @ Vortech

It's an absurdity that games I think of as being good at facilitating community have these weird relationships with players and in their esteem describe them as being almost…abusive. It's not enough that it just has communication features and represents a virtual "Third Place" (in fact I don't really use ANY of Destiny's communication features.) There is some attribute(s) in a type of game that supports this kind of thing. I think part of it is that most of the gameplay does not require rapt attention. It needs to offer that kind of tension, but most of the time you would not want the distraction from the socializing.

It also needs to be structured to keep players coming back, to facilitate the social interactions to begin with. As Claude said, if you put the game down after finishing it, how do you continually play it with your friends? And the only possible way to do this is to draw things out in terms of activities and grind, since it's impossible to create new substantially polished and interesting content for everyday someone might log on.

This is why the "abusive" relationship you describe is basically required for social games. The exception I guess would be something like Second Life, where players create things and there's no narrative or game "goal".