The trust fund

I'm so glad I'm not a law student. I know a few of them, and gives new meaning to the word "workload". All that reading. Omigosh. Can I get it in PDF? Or in MP3? No, it's all overpriced textbooks which weigh 9kg just in the table of contents. And all that contract examination and writing. Ugh.

So it was to my dismay to discover the term "social contract" being used in video games. Well, initially. After about 4 seconds of talking about it, it seems to make sense. The guarantee of certain social interactions. Got it. Works well. Two most important elements are trust and safety. Trust is one of those weird things at the moment. It's a very fragile issue for many people, but surprisingly, games have worked quite well in fostering environments of trust.

I think the great difficulty in creating an agreement about trust is the great deal of past experiences brought to the game by the players. I think of the people who have had trust violated in earlier stages of life and what difficulty that may pose to trusting in a game. A game may be, to some people, just another environment where their trust is broken. The thing is that, especially in MMORPGs where several hours of life are invested, rewards, items and money take on a much greater value. And so, in these cases, a betrayal really IS an issue game developers need to address. I think the value created by the time spent in-game also have the potential to create these trust-shattering moments. Peculiar, maybe, but I have played several MMOs where people have been extremely put off the game because someone quite seriously betrayed their trust with an expensive item or load of money. Some cases are unavoidable, and perhaps ill-addressed by the developers.


I think of other games like Call of Duty 4 or Battlefield 2 where you are divided into two teams trying to kill the opposing forces. The developers made the interesting choice to turn friendly fire on by default, meaning that team killing would have the potential to run rampant. This design choice is counterbalanced with demerit points for killing people on your team, as well as the addition of the vote-kick feature. This allows players to nominate these annoying time-wasters and send them to the video game equivalent of the Abyss (AKA, kick them off the server). It seems that this voting feature requires players to place a certain amount of trust in each other to remove the defective player. Interesting, as their subject for voting is created by enabling a potential breach of trust. This seems to be a social contract many players have adapted to, otherwise FPS games wouldn't be the fastest selling genre of games.

Whichever way trust is fostered (or destroyed), it seems that players will indeed come back for more if the conditions are clearly communicated. The social contract. It'll be pleasure doing business with you.