Jay Barnson on Getting Social With Frayed Knights

While I’m sure seeing “social” in the title is enough for some people to see red*, I can assure that the latest blog post from Frayed Knights’ developer Rampant Coyote/Jay Barnson is quite thoughtful, and not at all an endorsement of Zynga and the likes. Here’s a snip:

In the early years of D&D, there were a few modules that many players went through. In that respect, it was a shared experience. We all had different party compositions, different approaches, and of course a different game-master running us through the experience, so there was enough differences to be worth talking about.

Back when I was working at SingleTrac, lunch hours would often include a group game session, often a cooperative mission-based combat sim of some kind. Often our after-game discussions took longer than the game session itself. We loved sharing our different views of what was essentially the same experience. While we’d all played the same game, we all had unique angles on it, and we loved talking about it. If it was a competitive game, of course, it was fun sharing what had happened on the different sides. It was fun to discover that what we thought was an incredibly clever stratagem was actually just dumb luck, or vice-versa.

Sometimes, with a single-player CRPG (especially for a guy like me, who often doesn’t finish a game until a year or more after it’s (current)), it’s a pretty lonely experience. Not that I usually mind I gravitate towards these kinds of games because there are times I really just want to enjoy an adventure all by myself. Unless I am stumped or stuck and looking for a solution, I tend to ignore any community of players out there. But other times, I really like to hunt down a forum or something and see what other people are saying about the game, especially if it leads me to better understand the game or the possibilities for enjoyment. That’s something I’d like to foster, but it’s really hard to do in a little indie game. If you assume that only 1% of the players are predisposed to take that kind of initiative and contribute to the discussion, that’s not a lot of people.

It’d be nice if the game itself made it easy. And, to be honest, it’d probably help sales if the game made it easy for players to broadcast to their social networks that they are playing the game and doing exciting stuff. However, I grew pretty disgusted by all the Facebook & Twitter messages from certain games announcing the discovery of a certain flower or rock in a game I don’t give a crap about. That’s (doing it wrong,) in my opinion. Decent idea, poor implementation, maybe. Bombarding friends with stuff like that isn’t a good idea.