Sexy Videogameland has a great item today:
For example, look at Demon's Souls. If you saw my Kotaku feature 'In Praise of Hard Games,' you might remember producer Takeshi Kaiji's story of the inspiration for Demon's Souls' multiplayer -- it came from an experience he had of strangers helping strangers when several cars were stranded in the snow. In Demon's Souls, the multiplayer experience doesn't so much allow people to play together as it does allow them to share the same world, collaborating only when circumstances make it valuable and interesting.
In that way, the multiplayer enhances a solo experience, rather than acts as a separate "mode." And the fact that your interactions with other players are always anonymous -- you'll never know who left you that helpful message, or who that phantom was that helped you beat the boss -- it works with the lonely, ghostly feel of the game rather than clutter it with the presence of too many "others," which is often a turn-off for people who like games to be private experiences (me, me).
This is a new form of multiplayer experience that has developed recently, but it can be applied to more than just games. This type of design can inform entire social systems.
Today, I went to the Apple Store to pick up a
new iPhone case, but instead of an Apple employee helping me, another customer piped up, voluntarily, and gave me her suggestions. We ended up having a 10 minute conversation, user to user, about both the cases we were buying but also a few other tangents, and it was a far more personal experience.
How can we design communities, architecture, websites, services that leverage this? Crowdsourcing, a term that has become vague and almost pejorative, is a beginning stab at achieving this, but we need to make it more personal, more persistent, and more relevant.
