Towards a Design Framework for Controlled Hybrid Social Games

Many times, NPCs are unaware of their environment, causing them to miss essential information and die as a result. They are also usually unable to dynamically build temporary coalitions, reason about norms, or use any other social coordination mechanism that will control their decision making and behaviour. In fact, most NPCs are very simple script machines that have very poor social skills. Dynamic NPCs would be one solution to the boredom of having to deal with these simple messengers. However, game designers fear that the loss of control over the agents may cause the game to get out of hand and destroy the gaming experience by breaking the storyline. Our proposal is that in addition to using different NPC architectures based on the function of NPCs (thus making them more challenging or engaging), one may rely on social coordination mechanisms that apply within such hybrid social games (hybrid here implies a mix of human and NPC participants interacting) and thus achieve an acceptable level of control over characters. We understand that both elements are non-trivial and carry different concerns, hence we propose to separate those concerns by proposing a clear separation between the game itself and the characters that participate in it. In this paper we focus on the first direction. Although in this paper we limit our discussion to hybrid social games, the design approach that we propose applies to other sorts of dynamic coordinated sociotechnical systems like participatory simulation environments and open regulated MAS.