Interesting post. One small area where I might have a useful insight:
A lot of online multiplayer games rest on the appeal of their character design. Think of Smash Bros, Overwatch, or League of Legends. Characters’ unique abilities give rise to a dense hypergraphs of strategic relationships which players will want to learn the whole of. But in these games, a character cannot have unique motivations. They’ll have a backstory that alludes to some, but in the game, that will be forgotten. Instead, every mind will be turned towards just one game and one goal: Kill the other team, whoever they are. MostPointsWins forbids the expression of the most interesting dimensions of personality. So imagine how much richer expressions of character could be if you had this whole other dimension of gameplay design to work with. That would be cohabitive.
Role-playing games, including online multiplayer RPGS (“MMORPGs”), often achieve this. In SWTOR, when I play my Empire-hating fallen-to-the-dark-side Jedi Knight, versus my heart-of-gold bounty hunter, or my murderously-insane Sith Inquisitor, I make very different choices even when faced with the same content. This is most-obviously manifest in the dialogue tree choices for the main story, but extends to other aspects of gameplay as well. Whether I take a stealth route or go on a murderous rampage; whether my character does all the side missions or jumps straight to the main objective; which companions I choose to bring along; and even what clothes I wear.
This role playing mostly does go out the window in the “most intense” parts of the game (PvP and raids). Although sometimes over voice chat we’ll briefly slip into character for fun, or compliment each other on a particularly on-point use of abilities. (“Just like a smuggler, to stun all the trash.”)
One key ingredient here is strong archetypes from an existing background (e.g. the Star Wars galaxy in my case, or the Warcraft universe in others, or maybe just fantasy in general). Another is the long-lasting investment and relationship one builds with their character, from design onward; I feel a lot more connection to my SWTOR characters than I do to the random personalities I pick up in any given Betrayal at House on the Hill session.
Anyway, maybe there’s something to learn here for your game design!
I can imagine some readers just responding “roleplay, you’re describing roleplay”.
Ray Doraisami brought up ttrpgs, but we agreed that conflict rarely exists in them. My guesses at the reasons were: - Compelling roleplay requires everyone in the room to buy into the same story or else the vibe will shatter? - It’s too difficult for players to keep any sort of secret, because peoples’ interactions with the world are totally mediated by the DM, and everyone can hear the DM. It might be much easier to do if there were more than one DM and people could go into separate rooms sometimes.
I might describe digital cohabitives as a multiplayer roleplaying games but with thematic incentives. Characters and their different incentives wouldn’t just be stories that players are entertaining, they’d be codified in the scoring (leveling?) system, which may in turn be used by the matchmaking system to cohort out bad roleplayers.
Interesting post. One small area where I might have a useful insight:
Role-playing games, including online multiplayer RPGS (“MMORPGs”), often achieve this. In SWTOR, when I play my Empire-hating fallen-to-the-dark-side Jedi Knight, versus my heart-of-gold bounty hunter, or my murderously-insane Sith Inquisitor, I make very different choices even when faced with the same content. This is most-obviously manifest in the dialogue tree choices for the main story, but extends to other aspects of gameplay as well. Whether I take a stealth route or go on a murderous rampage; whether my character does all the side missions or jumps straight to the main objective; which companions I choose to bring along; and even what clothes I wear.
This role playing mostly does go out the window in the “most intense” parts of the game (PvP and raids). Although sometimes over voice chat we’ll briefly slip into character for fun, or compliment each other on a particularly on-point use of abilities. (“Just like a smuggler, to stun all the trash.”)
One key ingredient here is strong archetypes from an existing background (e.g. the Star Wars galaxy in my case, or the Warcraft universe in others, or maybe just fantasy in general). Another is the long-lasting investment and relationship one builds with their character, from design onward; I feel a lot more connection to my SWTOR characters than I do to the random personalities I pick up in any given Betrayal at House on the Hill session.
Anyway, maybe there’s something to learn here for your game design!
I can imagine some readers just responding “roleplay, you’re describing roleplay”.
Ray Doraisami brought up ttrpgs, but we agreed that conflict rarely exists in them. My guesses at the reasons were:
- Compelling roleplay requires everyone in the room to buy into the same story or else the vibe will shatter?
- It’s too difficult for players to keep any sort of secret, because peoples’ interactions with the world are totally mediated by the DM, and everyone can hear the DM. It might be much easier to do if there were more than one DM and people could go into separate rooms sometimes.
I might describe digital cohabitives as a multiplayer roleplaying games but with thematic incentives. Characters and their different incentives wouldn’t just be stories that players are entertaining, they’d be codified in the scoring (leveling?) system, which may in turn be used by the matchmaking system to cohort out bad roleplayers.