👋 SOCIALIZERS

Their main goals are about interacting with people and what they have to say. Even observing people play can be rewarding for them. To provide socializers what they want, our game will use social mechanisms that involve other players such as friending, gifting, chats, caring, guilds, competitions and so on. Here are few examples for such game mechanics:

Trading — Trading provides an opportunity for players to interact with each other, which adds a social depth to your game. A successful trade is a win-win situation, which also perceived as a reward for both sides of the deal (both players are reaping the fruits of their social interaction by receiving what they wish for). Trading also adds an additional layer of non-combat mutual interaction, which satisfies socializers to interact with others even if the other player is not interested in socializing (i.e. an achiever trading with a socializer; for the achiever the reward will be to get the desired item, and for the socializer the interaction itself will be the reward even more than the benefit of the deal).

Catan Universe: Trading resources between players.

Gifting — Allowing players in your game to send gifts or donate resources to their friends. Unlike trading, gifting can be a one-sided process. Some players will actively send gifts, while others will passively receive them. However, receiving a gift motivates a mutual interaction between the sides, as the receiver is somewhat obligated to gift back or to contribute to the community. For example, if the receiver is part of a guild and won’t gift back, there’s a risk that this player will be kicked from the team in order to make room for more committed players.

Pokemon Go: Sending gifts to your friends — satisfying feeling of helping and saying ‘hello’.

Chatting —Having a chat mechanic will give your players opportunities to socialize and will convey the presence of other players in your game — making your game feel more dynamic and alive in real-time. In addition to the social establishment, an in-game chat can help your players to coordinate their strategy as a group, sharing tips, answer questions and make new connections.

Club Penguin: Because of its kid-oriented content, chatting with players is designed with pre-defined options and topics instead of free text messaging.

Forming Guilds — Allowing players to form a guild or to be part of teams, based on common interests, makes them feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. It motivates collaboration, competition, and elitism: meaning each member of the team tries to secure the pride of the group by taking specific actions. As a game designer, adding the option of showing the player’s contribution to the team will motivate the urge to try harder and will reward personal pride even if the team itself lost (in case that we are the top player among our team).

King of Thieves: Forming guilds. Being part of a group is also a motivator for killers, attempting to frustrate its rivals and beating the competition.

Friending — Send a friend request or invite others by sending invitations to join the game. Needless to say, playing with others is very appealing for socializers, but while this kind of interaction is one way of socializing in your game, even if your game won’t allow a direct player-to-player interaction, it can still support friending via invitations to create a friend-ladder: Friend-ladders are forming a conformity-anchor, which encourage the socializers' motivation to play out of what their friends achieved and where they are compared to us — even when they are offline. This component also appeals to Killers.

Tower Bloxx: friend-ladder showing the top floor of each friend in a visual way during the game itself, making the feeling of beating that score way more rewarding.

Sharing Knowledge — Allowing players to share knowledge with others in your game, helping peers or helping the group to achieve its shared goal, will be a reward for socializers. Even if the group will eventually lose, being valuable during the round itself is a reward. There are many forms of sharing knowledge: some of them are extrinsic to the game (meta-socializing) such as writing guides (exactly as I’m doing here :P ), or can be intrinsic to the game such as share the knowledge of a danger-zone via ping wheel and alert the group altogether to take caution or to stay away.

League of Legends: The ping wheel is self-explanatory, so it should be easy to understand when and how to use it.

Caretaking — Caretaking corresponds with game genres like farming and pets very often, but there’s more to this— the idea is to have a game component that allows socializers to actively support the other players. Many battle games that are more ‘killer-oriented’ by design will combine a caretaking mechanic to appeal to socializers as well — for example, having a “healer” class. When a healer is part of the team it allows the player to feel useful to the rest of the party, usually by escorting them along the way and not going solo; This is a mutual interaction because the party will also have to take care of its healer which is usually lower in stats compared to offensive classes. Socializers will be part of such games because they can feel valuable and they would love to help others.

Heroes of the Storm: the character Rehgar is healing NPCs.

Competition — It really depends on how you design the competition in your game in order to change the balance from appealing to socializers rather than appeal to killers. This component suits both players, as it involves other players: as long as you will leverage the player’s participation and its contribution to the team’s shared effort, allow them to exchange information and allow the team to socialize under certain social mechanics as shown above — it will appeal to socializers. On the other hand, if you will leverage the stress caused to the other side, design it without collaboration and enhance ways to disrupt other players’ experience, it will appeal more to killers.

Spectating — As briefly mentioned in the beginning, even observing others playing is appealing for socializers. Watching an online match or a video of someone playing is perceived as a “learning” experience, learning from their mistakes and get inspired by their correct choices, which will allow socializers to share their knowledge with the community\group later on. In order to enhance the socializer motivation as a spectator, you can add extra interaction mechanics to this mode, for example: voting for others (giving the feeling of influencing the game and being part of the team), betting on the game, cheering the players (gives a feeling of supporting), chatting with players, etc.