The Keep Me Company Company is a radical non profit adventure in giving more value to doing positive things.

Keep Me Company Company was conceived as an engine for visualising, raising and sustaining an area’s Jen ratio, a measure of the social well being of an environment designed by positive psychologist Dacher Keltner.

KMCC casts players as executives in a company which profits from the social feats performed by it’s employees. Those playing collect points (‘bucks’) which accumulate in a central pool to bolster the companies share in a fictional market, against our competitor UnSociable inc. The game beings with UnSociable Inc having a 100% market share – and the aim of the game is to perform enough tasks to gain 100% market dominance. This amount of points needed to win varies with the amount of players, the location we play in, or depending on how long we want the game to last.

KMCC uses sms messages to keep the player informed of what is happening in the game, and users will need to register their number and send texts in order to play. Once the user has begun playing they get sent a “job” – a simple task designed to try and foster a meaningful interaction with people they might not have met. The tasks are randomly generated – “harder” tasks – requiring more complex social interactions – are sent out less often, but have a stronger chance of fostering deeper social links. They are also designed to be fun!

Examples of these tasks include:

Smile at another person
Teach a person something
Start a club with someone
Tell someone a secret
Have a staring competition

Playtesting

We spent August skipping between UK music festivals and running KMCC for audiences there.
Executives have two types of task, they can either complete a social job, delivered to their phone by text message, and receive 10 bucks, or stay near the ‘board room’ to respond to external requests as they come in: non-players texting the company number with a location and wanting to meet someone new.

KMCC was designed with a specific type of social space in mind. In order for the design to function there must be a contained social environment within which a loose sense of group already exists. We chose music festivals for our first playtests, but a University Campus, school, Workplace, Conference or single neighbourhood would be equally suitable environments.

We handed out business cards in the hours preceding the game to raise awareness of both the asynchronous roles of executive and customer. The game ran for two hours on the first full day of each festival we visited. We had thousands of points earned and hundreds of social interactions performed in game within these tests, and we learned a great deal about the reality of encouraging this sort of radical social openness and peoples responses to it.

You can read more about our thoughts playtesting this game at http://www.playlablondon.com/9660978489

Hey Drew!

The play-testing went very well in total, the blog post linked is our attempt to understand in a formal way where we went wrong – and you always will go wrong somewhere! We’re trying hard to learn the lessons available here.

I think that a festival is a good location for playing games – though intoxicated players are always harder to inform of your rules! When you are running a game at a festival you are in a highly competitive attention economy and it’s worth bearing that in mind.

We found that with repeated playtesting we were able to engineer our game into something with a solid structure and shape, and smooth the players journey through the tasks and their interaction with the system to the point where it worked without a hitch. We also learned a lot about tempering our language in order to convey the games content and tone quickly and effectively, and about how to best appeal to the audience in these spaces.

I think the most powerful lesson (and the subject of the blog post) was about the psychology of the player. Sometimes when your intentions are very positive, and even when your experience is totally free, (as a community we made no money here – all funded out of pocket!) people may respond in unexpected ways when you ask them to breach social norms in order to play a game. Ultimately we found that the best way to have people behave in extraordinary ways is to provide them with a more extra-ordinary justification.

Let me know if you want any more information, I’m always delighted to talk with people about design

There are two ways to come at this.
First – test and iterate! Especially in games with social play. A lot of things which seem sensible in conversation will be difficult to pull off in reality, and nothing will tell you more quickly whether you are asking for the right sort of action from your players than trying it out yourself in a public space.

Second – bake better bravery into your design.
There are a number of ways to make doing difficult things easier. Offering costumes (especially masks) and archetypical characters will go a long way to ameliorating your players potential discomfort. It is easier for ‘A Robot’ to do something silly than it is for Bob Smith.
Make sure you get your fiction down – people are more apt to run around if a monster is chasing them than if you just ask them to have a run. Your narrative justifications for ludic devices are important and a little bit of theatre wont hurt either.

Breaking the breaching wall isn’t easy, and these are very general pieces of advice – when you start trying to apply solid social theory to your games everything gets more complex, and it’s a lot to balance in one design. What have you come across that has helped Drew?

Yes on the teachers contacts!

The one thing I didn’t really broach in my last reply, because it’s far too big a topic really and justifiably books have been written on it – is your game design! The narrative, costuming, characterisation and theatre are all dressing if your core mechanic doesn’t function well enough.

Real incentives are very powerful, but they can lead to an ugly dynamic. I’ve been involved in games where ipads and other big prizes are on offer and there was a real element of desperation to the play. Ideally the reward for play will be intrinsic – baked into the fun of the game.

What a great discussion—learning a lot from both of you. I participated in a conference game at which iPads were the prize (along with free entry to the next year’s event—worth hundreds of $$) and it did, indeed, become a pretty intensive effort on the part of a couple of players. They won handily by devoting the conference to playing the game. I think I won, though, by attending the conference and skipping the game (esp when it became apparent what it would take to beat those guys). I spent that time actually networking and talking to people, rather than “networking” to “win points.”

Baking in the rewards intrinsically: would love to hear of examples in social games.

RE: Darwins monster – not yet! I’ll give you a nudge when we get one up.

While we didn’t measure pro-social outcomes in Darwin’s monster it was anecdotally evident that there was still a strong positive social outcome in something which was not designed to have one.