in-game peeps

One of the main social principles we brought into the knighthood game was the idea of being able to peep, or check out, someone’s in-game persona.  The two main tools that we appropriated from the social web are the idea of a user profile and more importantly the activity feed.  User game profiles and player histories have been done before in other games, but they had been treated very superficially.  A game profile was just a trophy shelf and someone’s battle history was nothing more than some nice win-loss stats.  Traditionally, most game designers thought of the gamer profile as a bragging space.

With knighthood’s player profile and activity history we focused on the web user’s habit of info voyeurism.  Combing through a player’s activity feed and game profile provides a lot of useful info about what he/she has been doing. But, it also helps a person gain tactical insight in an opponent and the ability to learn new game tricks from better players.  The challenge for the game designer here is being able to publicly reveal as much meaningful activity without compromising a person’s game.

Several great outcomes have come out of a creating a meaningful profile and activity feed.

1. An asynchronous spectator sport.  If two in-game celebrity rivals are having a war, or if some other significant event goes on, like users rebelling and escaping out of an alliance dungeon, a lot of users will often scan all participants recent activities to figure out the play by play.

2. Dramatic stories.  We’ve had several users create a more dramatic telling of what are pretty dry sequences of game events in a player’s activity feed.

3. Game gossip and ethical debates.  A lot of knighthood is about politics and negotiation.  Some people can be a little underhanded in the game, but when that happens, usually a trail is kept in the activity feed that people follow with earnest and use that as a discussion on deeper issues of game ethics, values, fair play, etc…