And Why It Matters

Blog post written by Omar Shehata, Software Development Intern at Outpost Games.

Two months ago, I started an internship at Outpost Games as their first and only full-time engineering intern. I had been making games for years, but never had a “real” industry job, so I gave it a shot.

Over the past few weeks I’ve watched our game, SOS — which was developed in relative obscurity — shoot up to the front page of Twitch, garnering tens of thousands of live viewers and millions more views on YouTube after the fact.

SOS reached the #4 spot on Twitch during our Closed Alpha playtest!

Our bets were right: there really was an unmet need for players to perform in front of a live audience and for games to reward and acknowledge that.

Following the Alpha, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why we were making this kind of game. I wanted to find out exactly what was behind our desire to “turn every player into a performer.”

What makes a game fun to watch?

SOS is a first person multiplayer PC survival game presented as a fictional reality TV show. Sixteen contestants find themselves on the mysterious La Cuna Island where they are tasked with locating and extracting hidden relics in order to escape. At most, three players can get off the island each match.

In-game screenshot of La Cuna Island

The design of SOS is motivated by a simple idea:

Players are far more interesting than any content developers can create.

Once we accepted that, the design focused completely on creating an experience that breeds drama, fosters relationships, and tests loyalty.

Every player starts each match with no weapons or equipment. Because the island is infested with deadly monsters, Contestants are encouraged to form ad-hoc teams with whomever they meet early on. The fact that only three Contestants can escape, however, means they’ll have to make some tough choices on who to save and who to leave behind.

The native inhabitants of the island — the Hupia — don’t like being disturbed

All of these design decisions force Contestants to form unlikely alliances, betray one another, or sacrifice themselves to help relative strangers. These human interactions are a big part of what makes SOS so exciting to watch.

Acknowledging the audience

What’s really unique about SOS is that there are two ways to win a match. In fact, there are two completely distinct leaderboards.

Survival vs Fame

The Survival Leaderboard is the more standard of the two. Players rank-up here by escaping La Cuna Island. However, if players want to climb the Fame Leaderboard, they have to put on the best show. How do we know who put on the best show? That’s where the live audience comes in!

Feedback System

Whenever you watch someone play (whether spectating in-game after death or watching streams on Hero.tv), you can give live feedback using the integrated feedback system. As a viewer, this allows you to react in real time to that player’s performance. At the end of a match, each Contestant’s Fame is calculated by combining the total number of viewers with the kind of feedback received through the feedback system.

As a player, you can see in real time the top sentiments you’re getting from your live viewers as you play:

The aggregate feedback shows up at the bottom of your screen

It’s still a pretty naive system, but we’re already seeing it award entertaining performances and match people together who are most likely to put on a good show. It acts both as an incentive to perform and a way for viewers to reward what they like.

Over the course of the Closed Alpha, SOS quickly became a game where charm and charisma were just as valuable to winning as a quick trigger finger.

The Hawthorne Effect

It’s long been theorized that being watched changes one’s behavior. SOS capitalizes on that phenomenon by showing players exactly how many people are watching them at any given time.

Live Viewer Count

The number shown here is how many eyes a player has on them at any given moment. If you’re a streamer, we partially pull this data from whatever streaming service you’re using to broadcast. Even if you’re not streaming, but you find yourself in view of someone who has a thousand people watching them, your view count will increase.

I found it to be a really intense feeling running around in the game, and seeing my view count dramatically increase to a few thousand. Suddenly I wanted to do whatever it took to keep those eyes on me.

This is what strikes me as one of the coolest things about SOS and a big part of what we’re hoping to achieve with this game. Contestants don’t have to be big-shot streamers — or even streamers in the first place — to garner an audience.

If you like to perform, whoever you are, SOS is your stage.

Why does it matter?

People want to perform, and audiences want to connect. We hope that the additional data offered by SOS and Hero.tv allows content creators to craft more engaging content for their audiences. Seeing exactly what moments were the funniest or evoked the most rage will hopefully lead to more of those memorable performances down the line. Additionally, we’ve already found this data useful in the development of SOS. We’re using the audience feedback data from our Closed Alpha to learn what aspects of our game really resonate with fans!

Gaming as a medium for interactive theater is something I’m personally very excited about. I want to see improvised shows that adapt and evolve to a growing audience.

But most of all, I want to see people who have never thought of themselves as performers get a taste of the spotlight. It’s so fulfilling to hear from people who have never streamed before, and who’ve started broadcasting themselves after playing SOS.

It’s been a great start with the launch of the SOS Closed Alpha and Hero.tv, but this is just the beginning. If you’re curious about how the rest of this story unfolds you can follow SOS on Twitter (or get involved)!