The Sociality of Video Games

Modern society is mediated by social infrastructure. Basketball hoops tender play as social lubricant, playgrounds afford the respite of adult conversation among parents, while a park bench makes possible chance encounters. Eric Klinenburg in his book Palaces for the People defines “social infrastructure” as “the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact”.¹ Alongside our mores, social infrastructure not only supports our need to connect but inspires us to do so, providing a blueprint that helps shape the worlds we inhabit while shaping the people that we become within them.

The advent of modern video games in the ‘70s and ‘80s created new avenues for play-infused infrastructure. Video arcades cultivated bonding and relationship building, giving rise to their own social norms and rites of inclusion. Though entertaining on their own, video games served as a “social MacGuffin” in the nexus of these arcades; like board games, they provided a reason to not just gather but linger. As a testament to this, one of the earliest home consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey, was envisioned partly as a board game, including a playmat and tokens along with the hardware.

This early history helps highlight a critical transformation as we have moved online and increased the fidelity of gaming experiences. Today video games transcend physical distance, drawing people together around the promise of play and providing a shared purpose that helps in fostering bonds across cultures. Where once video games merely served as the toys of our social parlours, today these digital worlds now function directly as habitable infrastructure. In short, video games have become the very social parlour itself.

The concept of video games as social infrastructure is profound. The shift necessitates a fundamental change in how we think about games as a society. It befits us to take greater responsibility in the games we create and their impact on players and communities. Building a game that others gather around is fundamentally different from architecting the very gathering space itself. When we create a park, we don’t just design playground equipment and take no care in the rest–we design the whole park. For instance, parks also need to feel accessible; separate from its playground, a successful park is likely to be within a few minutes’ walk, not be overly prescriptive in its affordances, and should feel truly public. Today online gaming must be approached from a similar holistic lens. We need to design the whole park.

When we don’t consider video games as real-life spaces then we fail to look at the problems as they truly exist: humans are complex creatures with complex beliefs and whose relationships are fraught. This has always been true and is something as a society we’ve wrestled with in designing our world. If video games are where people are congregating today, then it is clear those challenges will exist there, too. Social infrastructure offers us a framework for understanding games that collocate people as well as the role of such games in society.

As designers we must be concerned not only with the playability of the games we make, but also with their sociality. This is a change for an industry that may otherwise dismiss social design as reserved for social media or at most social-network games, which feature contrived exchanges like requesting resources, passively visiting another player’s realm, or sending invites through social networks. Online multiplayer games like first-person shooters (‘FPSes’) or multiuser online battle arenas (‘MOBAs’) are therefore “not social” despite their more elaborate forms of player interaction, which typically include more explicit socialisation and collaboration such as pings or voice chat. Thus, while the value of playing together may be understood, the quality of social interactions was rarely a primary design goal. It was enough to ensure the means for interaction existed to support the core gameplay.

With sociality as a design goal, however, it invites us to study social infrastructure and its goals. We can explore how playing together enhances gameplay and enriches our lives. This means thinking beyond traditional game design and considering both the spaces and the player dynamics that emerge. Beyond how our environments look, uphold the narrative, or provide diegetic guidance, for instance, we can ask how we foster trust and encourage cooperation within those environments; or, how our designs mediate interactions among strangers, build pathways for inclusivity and tolerance, facilitate reciprocity, and encourage us to be compassionate. The choices we make serve to help define the social expectations and values we want to see in our gaming spaces and beyond.

Latham and Layton highlight several dimensions that can impact the success of social infrastructure in the context of cities, all of which should resonate in online gaming.² Notably they call out that such spaces are maintained, which includes the responsibility that “spaces feel cared for and safe [emphasis added]”.² Furthermore, they go on to say that “the accessibility of social infrastructure to people across society, regardless of age, race, class, sexuality, or gender, is an important component of how public the infrastructure is”.² Collectively, this points to a very clear set of responsibilities for game makers toward player wellbeing while also inviting us all to re-examine disruptive and harmful behaviour through the lens of society’s challenges, introducing opportunities to collaborate more broadly.

Overall, this investment will help online games reach their full potential, allowing players to have the best possible experiences together in fair, safe, and inclusive play spaces. From a business standpoint, players that feel safe and welcome will naturally want to spend more time in games and bring their friends too.

Outside of development, this also points to a path for greater acceptance. Long have we been burdened by the stigma of gaming as irrelevant or even harmful; instead, we can now come to embrace games for their role in providing essential social infrastructure. This opens the door to more critical examination while helping validate video games and the people who play them. To be inclusive of gaming spaces, for instance, means we collectively take on the challenge of teaching our children how to behave with care and respect online and off. We support them in their growth and understand the role gaming plays in many young people’s social development. And we create a path to defining healthy relationships with gaming, while adopting a shared responsibility for keeping everyone safe online.

Ultimately, when we fail to consider sociality in our designs, we pay a collective price as a society in the form of ill-being and disharmony. Looking at social infrastructure affords us not only a refreshing new perspective to help us in tackling the issues we see in games today but invites a more collaborative mindset that acknowledges video games for the important role they play in society: bringing us together.

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