Sociology for Gamedev. Part 1, Encounters

Learning from sociology, to design better systems

In these new series we’ll meet with Erving Goffman, to deconstruct social gatherings and then reconstruct them into video game mechanics. The ideas that we’re going to learn will serve us as inspirations in at least four aspects:

• Narrative - improved writing and storytelling, deeper dialogues, more nuanced interactions.

• Mechanics - actions, rules, procedures, affordances.

• Worldbuilding and scenography - setting, environment, mythologies, lore, ambience, context.

• Emergent design - actions and behaviours that are not strictly programmed, but emerge from the game context that was designed.

For the first episode in the series, let’s start with what might be called a micro-sociology, meaning, the study of close social relations (as opposed to grand sociological theories of everything). You might know Goffman from his other work, especially on framing and total institutions, as well as from the idea of social face, face-work. In Encounters he looks into the seemingly banal everyday interactions, dissecting their dynamics and rules.

To dive deeper into these concepts, hear from Goffman himself:

Goffman, E. (1961). Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

Ok, let’s avoid long-winded introductions and let’s tackle our first concept:

Focused and unfocused interactions

The first distinction, differentiation that Goffman proposes is that we should split interactions into two categories: focused and unfocused.

Unfocused interaction: people share the same space, but that’s it. They do not talk to each other or enter any other meaningful action. That does not mean they don’t influence each other. Think how your behaviour changes when you are alone in an elevator and at some point other people walk in.

Focused interaction: people sustain a single cognitive attention. It might be a conversation, but also a game with a common goal. Such interaction may be completely silent and still be a meaningful interaction.

This is only the first page of the preface and we might already come up with consequences for game design:

Narrative: Not everything has to be a dialogue. Cherish silence as a meaningful part of our interactions. Include gestures, facial expressions and meaningful gaze.  
When writing for the environment (for example barks), remember that people change their behaviour depending on who is in their vicinity. E.g. NPCs might get anxious and stop conversating when the main character enters a room.
This also apply for any internal dialogues - character's introspections should relate to their surrounding. For example, they might be just observing other people and commenting internally.

Mechanics: Include into consideration the switch from unfocused to focused interaction. Implement the attention that goes into sustaining the interaction. You might want to use a visual metonymy (UI element) or something more naturalistic, like a change on character's faces. Unfocused versus focused might even mean a radical change of mode: from 3D to 2D, from isometric to first person, etc.

Emergent: design spaces with opportunities for interactions. Provide a space for free roaming (unfocused), where people might get into spontaneous actions (focused) - those being minigames, chats, common tasks etc.

Worldbuilding: You can adopt the interaction-first attitude and design settings with interaction at the core. So, if the interaction is a conversation, build a scenography that will facilitate that conversation. Include details that might be meaningful for the conversation, either highlighting topics or conveying a deeper meaning. Or include props that will be used during the conversation or will stimulate it. For example, an angry character is in an argument with his son and grabs a glass trophy that was won by his son and smashes it against a wall. The glass trophy was a static part of the scenography previously (unfocused), but now, the heated conversation (focused) makes a key emotional and very dynamic element of the scene.

Social roles are dynamic

At this point we all probably know very well that we assume social roles in our everyday lives, and we switch those roles in particular contexts. From 9am to 5pm you express the role of a co-worker, expert, designer. You come home and now you’re a parent, friend, lover and so on. This concept is so ubiquitous that we might think of it as part of common knowledge and something completely obvious.

It wasn’t that obvious in the ‘60s and we need to note that Erving Goffman was one of the main contributors to the idea of social role, bringing this metaphor from theatrical performances. We’re all playing on the grand stage of the society. You are never truly yourself, you always act for other people.

What is less known are the details. Let’s go through the main features:

• Role-taking is dynamic. You perform a serious work-related presentation and suddenly your mother walks into a room and suddenly your role changes, because you have to say ‘Hi’ to your mum. Your language changes, your behaviour changes. And you rarely control it.

• We are cross-cut with many social roles at all times. It’s not like we assume one role for one time-slot and then we change. Multiple roles play out constantly and sometimes we get confused which role should be the dominant. Are you a serious co-worker or are you a friend from work? Are you a politician, representing the government, or are you a fellow human, with human needs and desires?

• Roles are not simple labels or categories. Social roles are complex aggregates of expectations, habits, customs, rules and responsibilities.

Narrative: Play with multitudes. Do not assume that the main character has one personality. Foresee how their language and behaviour might change, given different people that they interact with. Maybe their emotional palette completely changes, when talking to someone close?

Mechanics: If being literal, you might colour-code different social roles. For example, a blue background for the role of a teammate, grey background for the role of a customer. Or implement different mechanics: a simple dialogue box for casual conversations, but something more complex in a 'detective mode' for interrogating suspects.
Many games codify roles (tank, healer, engineer etc.) with statistics, affordances and inventory. This is very static thought. A surgeon can act as a friend, even during a heart transplant. Game affordances related to roles should be more dynamic - but always related to the other character/person. For example, main character does a heist on a bank. They can shoot and break locks. But only in the company of an old psychotic friend, the main character may take hostages. 

Emergent: Allow people to be flexible with role-taking. Don't design an empty space, where people are just strangers, passing by. This requires either different kinds of actions (killing, kissing, stabbing, hugging, stealing - any verb you can think of) or communication (verbal, text, emotes or other). 

Wordbuilding: Inside is outside. Let the objects speak. Design a room in a way that in 3 seconds one can get a psychological portrait of a character. E.g., a corporate boss in a mostly empty room but he has a picture of his kids in the central place on his desk. Therefore we instantly get, that he has two dominant social roles: that of a boss, and the second one of a father.

There is also another crucial component to understanding of social roles:

• Rules of social roles are almost never explicit and clearly visible.

Therefore we’d rather observe limits and mishaps than someone saying openly what the rules are. More than that: we shouldn’t ask people, because people themselves don’t know the rules and will invent any bullshit to answer the question. People don’t know the rules - but they feel the rules. That’s why it takes us so much time to adjust every time we go to a foreign country, or enter a new social group.

Narrative: Follow the trope of entering a new social group and depict the struggle to comprehend the rules. The character may be shy and struggling or may be weird on purpose - to disrupt the social fabric, in order for rules to become explicit. If you want to write someone narcissistic, you can portray someone who has no regard to any rules, never mind the social costs. If you want to write someone on autism spectrum, you can depict a person that maybe would love to understand social rules, but struggles with comprehending them, because they have problem processing social cues.

Mechanics: You could implement some kind of a discovery system. Your character might gather notes that update after conversations. Or the better the character gets social rules, more dialogue options show up. Or they are allowed to participate in more social events/actions.

Emergent: Create an environment for people to make their own social rules and to play many overlapping roles. You can design environmental stimuli to foster group creation. In MMO open world context, people will do that anyway, even if it was not foreseen by developers (see: competitive boat racing servers in Minecraft). But without any design, the naturally occurring communities may not sprout. With too much design it will become too restrictive too fast, and top-down rules may feel oppressive. Design for the grassroots to happen.
Beware: in-group favoritism is beneficient, in general, to the formation and coherence of social groups and feeling nice about belonging. But it can quickly pivot to group chauvinism; including hate speech, violence and dehumanisation.

Situated system of activity

This term is introduced to describe focused interactions. By the situated system of activity Goffman means a given context of each interaction. This is to underline that we never interpret meanings without the current social, cultural, environmental and psychological context. We are always embedded it in something. Therefore: no two interactions are easily comparable, because we have to compare contexts as well.

This is important especially for multi-agent encounters, because group dynamics rely much more on context that two-person (dyad) encounters, which can rely more on psychological depth of a conversation.

Now, video games are not great with group dynamics, there aren’t many good examples of dialogues between 3+ characters. This should not surprise, it is much harder to write and design complicated dialogues, it is time consuming and costly in general. But should it be discarded? Group dynamics are worthy of being chased, because this is what gives live and vibrancy to created worlds. One of the biggest crimes of video games writing is being stiff, unnatural, paper, manufactured. Even if writers know how to write emotions, these emotions often feel overplayed, bizarre, manufactured. Why? Because we intuitively feel that such emotions come from the writer’s block and not from the interactional context.

That’s why narratives and coders and graphic designers should work closely, to get that context synchronicity, so everybody knows what the scene is and what are the scene’s affordances.

We also need to remember that context is not only spatial but also temporal. Meaning? We are almost never thrown randomly into circumstances with unknown people, unknown setting and with unknown tasks. Even if, the situation itself has to have some history, the environment has some history and people have their personal memory. Even if we use the overused amnesia trope, our virtual body has certain characteristics that allow for certain affordances - it had to had some past, some history, some evolution. If ‘now’ exists, ‘past’ is a given.

That point is especially crucial with any group dynamics. I refer to ethnometodological experiments (see for example: Garfinkel’s research), in which participants had to pretend in front of the family that only now, the present exists and any information from the past is inaccessible. The results? Family members thought that there is something really, really wrong, either lunacy or a cruel prank. Any interaction without time-dependent context is unnatural, even alien.

(Social) games

People engage in a vast spectrum of social games on daily basis. Some are more codified (board games, video games, contests), some are less (socialising at a party, queueing, social politeness). Let’s insert social games into video games.

Goffman interprets games as world-building activities. Game would be a social construct with its own rules, separate from the ‘real world’ rules. He speaks in terms of a matrix of possible events, not a set of strict rules:

A matrix of possible events and a cast of roles through whose enactment the events occur constitute together a field for fateful dramatic action, a plane of being, an engine of meaning, a world in itself, different from all other worlds except the ones generated when the same game is played at other times (Goffman, 1961, p. 26-27).

We create parallel realities to have fun, to strengthen our bonds, to escape the ‘real’ reality. Goffman invokes the term rules of irrelevance to highlight this separation from the mundane. Suddenly the Monopoly money has real value, dying in an RPG session feels hurtful and game objectives become our desires. At the same time we are obliged to ‘forget’ about real-world problems, in order not to spoil everybody’s fun.

To this we might add a few more observations:

• Social gatherings are multi-focal, have multiple focus points. The attention might ebb and flow from game to reality and vice versa. From a fight with elves to Bob bringing snacks to Sally turning on music to a flock of dragons burning a village.

• Games are embedded within games within games. The goal might be to win a battle, but our current goal might be to win with Jack, simultaneously impressing Theo.

• Flooding Out may occur - the point at which we are no longer capable of sustaining the imaginary game-world, and we break back to the real world.

• Social games are seldom without any connection to the real world. Often the whole fun comes from maintaining the tensions between game-world and real-world. Referencing the real world may break the illusion, but balancing on that thin line is fun. Goffman calls it the interaction Membrane.

We can plot out the consequences of such claims for video game design:

Narrative: Acknowledge that people constantly enter game-worlds embedded in the more general reality. Acknowledge that game-worlds have different rules and sets of values. Introduce some fun and competitiveness into your character's lives. Play on delicate tensions of the interaction membrane. Paint a realistic set of character-motivations. Create character-attitudes towards games, for example subversive irony. 

Emergent: Be prepared that players will come up with their own games within a game. Give players simple tools to create more complex game-systems.

Worldbuilding: Acknowledge that, if your game has humans as characters, they must be entangled in plethora of social games. What are those games about? What are the goals, rules and values? For example: the stereotypical middle-class dream under capitalism is to have a home or an apartment, a family with two children and a pet, a car and a high status job. What would the characters do, to achieve that status?

Role distance

Given what we’ve established so far, you can probably intuit the next claim:

• Social roles are flexible.

We can be playful about our current social roles, in other words, we can maintain some distance.

As Goffman shows, even seemingly the most strict roles - like that of a surgeon in an operating room - not only allow, but sometimes even require some amount of distance and playfulness.

But let’s backtrack for a moment. An individual plays multiple social roles, sometimes encountering role-conflicts, hesitations and dilemmas. We don’t always know which role to choose for the given situation. In some cases the audience helps (role-segregation by audience-segregation). If I’m in front of my students, my role is to be a teacher. But what if I meet one of the students at a party? Should I still maintain the role of a teacher, or should I embrace the role of a colleague?

The role is bound to a position. Physical position, when it’s a teacher’s desk, and abstract position, meaning a social position. Goffman further defines role as:
the typical response of individuals in a particular position (ibid, p. 93).

Therefore, although we might connect the social role to person’s identity and psyche, we need to understand that it is mostly relational and positional. We are the products of our social network and our socio-economical status. Is there any place for individuality? That’s where the distance comes into play.

Even if the role is strict, it’s up to you how you play it. You can be more and less expressive, you can overplay it (like overly dramatic actors), you can get meta and comment on role-playing, you can break from the role or go out of it. Would you stay in role, if nobody is observing you?

Sometimes we might experience incongruity between what actually happened and what was expected from a person in a certain role in a certain situated context. Such incongruities jeopardise sustaining stable definition of the situation, but can also generate new meanings.

In some cases people might embrace the role completely, dissolving in that virtual self created by the situation.

Now, the distance also needs an audience. There is no need for distance, if there’s nobody to show it. It’s all about showing our attitude to what we do and how we look. ‘I’m too old for this shit’, says the 11 years old boy, who enters a carousel and has fun, despite claiming it’s a disgrace for his honour. He has a self-image to sustain.

Narrative: Don't just write characters in social roles, write characters in social roles, with attitudes to these roles. Show individuality through the role distance. 
Change social roles with regard to character's audience. If there's no audience, allow the character to fart and pick nose... or whatever it means for the character to be alone. 
And what if the character's audience is the player? 

Mechanics + emergent: Allow players to express attitudes. In most of cases the main character and the main player are conjoined, or at least synchronised, so there should be a space for individuality not prescripted by dialogues only.

There’s more to be said, like for example power relations (your boss can afford to shorten the distance, you - not necessarily) and role subversion to dismantle the status quo, but let’s end here.

I hope this short article gave you a solid understanding of the theory of social roles and now you have at least a dozen of ideas how to implement the theory to digital worlds.

Let me know in the comments what do you think and subscribe to be notified of next episodes from these series.