Social Games (again)

Lest you think I'm slacking on my designerly duties, I've been dumping hours of work into a Social Games wiki Orion set up. We're using it as a place to flesh out a new game genre we hatched when I visited the Bay Area; its not public yet, but here's a bit of a preview.

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[From the intro page:]
Social Games are multiplayer games played as part of a social gathering.

The basic premise of a Social Game is that players arrive at a party, and are free to socialize normally, but a series of goals underlie the evening, and the actions of players throughout the party affect the result of the game. Ideally, the social and game parts of the activity support one another: the game inspires social interactions, while the social setting provides a rich mode of game playing.

The closest existing game concept to the Social Game concept is the How to Host a Murder series, or other murder mystery games, where a mystery-based game underlies a party. One or more game masters (usually the hosts) organize the game and distribute information and game materials to the players that are supposed to have it.

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[From one of my initial game sketches:]
In the Secret Amnesiac game, there are [[secret roles]], among which there is a single “amnesiac”, and no-one knows who. Specifically:

- The game is different every time you play it, perhaps using the [[combinatorial variation]] idea. Every time you play the game, the theme is somewhat different, the basic mechanics work a little differently, and the victory conditions are different, especially for a special player, called the Amnesiac.

- One player is the amnesiac, tasked with finding out what's going on in the game, who they are, what their victory conditions are (from among a set of possibilities, determined each game). Other players have partial information on these matters.

- Other players know that there is an amnesiac, but not who it is. Some of these players want to help the amnesiac, some want to hurt him - but all have other victory conditions that have nothing to do with the amnesiac, to drive the action. Each of these players is secretly assigned a role from a pool of possible roles when the game is run, and not all roles are used.

The “normal” players go about their business of playing the game as normal, trading, stealing, gambling, whatever - while keeping an eye out for the amnesiac.

The amnesiac tries to learn what they can, but most importantly tries to remain hidden. They should try to appear to be playing the game normally, maybe going so far as pretending to have one of the “normal” roles (though this has its own risks). This can be tricky when they know so little about the game, and it may be safer to try to find one person they think they can trust, who can tell them enough to get by on.

The problem with this game is that the amnesiac might be revealled very early on. The game will have to either be designed so that it can be played many times in an evening, or will have to continue to be compelling once the amnesiac is revealled (simply becoming a Bourne Identity-like game as mentioned on the [[secret roles]] page).

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I don't know if that all works out of context, but I wanted to provide a taste. The wiki is actually getting quite robust - I'll get a guest account set up soon, so let me know if you're interested in checking it out.