19 June 2010

A Brief History of Social Games

From game designer John Radoff comes a great poster that combines seriation and typology of social games, from knucklebone divination to XBOX and MMORPGs (via Kotaku).

Click on the image for a printable full-size version.

There's a lot to like here from the archaeologist's point of view. Radoff understands that sociocultural change is multilineal - in other words, it's not a question of one thing leading to another in a tidy sequence, but of multiple influences combining to spark changes in cultural forms. He's also captured a lot of forgotten pastimes, like play-by-mail strategy games, that were destroyed by the advent of the internet. One thing that is missing is a sense of spatial or geographical causality: i.e. how exactly do Go, Senet, and Leela connect to Monopoly historically, besides having some similar cognitive or gameplay aspects? Correlation does not imply causation.

I'm also a little curious why, given the elaborate historical paths he devises, why the modern social network games are all grouped together indiscriminately at the bottom - it gives a hint of the teleological fallacy, as if all of history was somehow a prelude to Mafia Wars, music pets, and the big-boobied princesses that are apparently the entire population of Evony. To be fair I don't think that's Radoff's point exactly - he's starting from contemporary social gaming and working backwards, rather than trying to show some kind of causal connection. (He probably could have shown this better by putting the modern social games at the top!)

Anyway, that's me being kind of hard on what's really a fun historical chart. Radoff includes a historical essay that makes some good points about the role of D&D in the evolution of social game culture:
1974 was perhaps the most important year in modern game history; this is when Dungeons and Dragons came to market. It integrated the ideas of abstracting tactical combat along with storytelling and a unique social aspect in which individual players used their imagination and creativity to contribute to the ongoing game. From D&D, you can trace a history through early mainframe computer games, to MUDs (multiuser dungeons) to MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, many people were looking to engage in asynchronous games that wouldn’t require groups to gather at set points in time, giving rise to play-by-mail games. The earliest implementations of online PBM games (aside from their manifestation as play-by-email games) were BBS “Door” games. Trade Wars is probably one of the most famous; and I wrote a game in this market called Space Empire a long time ago. A lot of these play-patterns are similar to what you’ll find in current Web-based and social-network games.
Read the rest!

1 comment:

  1. This has a pretty impoverished set of modern games. One would think from this scheme that people only play computer games now. I actually get together with my neighbors to play "social games" (board games, card games, etc.). Maybe we are just archaic or prehistoric in our game choices, but then drinking margaritas and telling jokes just isn't quite the same in virtual reality.

    Also, as a chronology chart, this diagram doesn't indicate the temporal duration of individual games (which ones are still going, and which ones died an early death?).