I’ve just returned from GDC, the game development community’s annual meet and greet, and for some unaccountable reason, I have social networking on my mind.

Multiplayer games exist roughly in a spectrum running from player-cooperative to player-competitive. I’m going to ignore player-competitive games in their pure form, like straight-up deathmatch, and focus on games with some level of co-op for today’s post.

Cooperative games, by their nature reward the formation of social networks, from simple teams , to giant guilds , and more complex economically-driven networks in trading games.

Today I want to distill social networking to its purest form as a game mechanic, and so I give you the Promiscuous Mage.

The Promiscuous Mage is a social multi-player game where all characters play magic-users. It is a game where it is quite literally not what you know, but who you know.

The game falls in the middle of the co-op/compete spectrum. Players form social groups, and these groups can come into conflict.

There is only one method of advancement in the game. There are no experience points, no skill trees as such. Every increase in power and skill directly correlates to the size and qualities of your social network.

Each player starts out by picking an initial group, like the Houses in Hogwarts, that determines their initial skill sets.

The player then goes about forging social networks. Every mage added to the network tree gives the player an incremental increase in their power. Attaching yourself to other mages with well-developed trees increases your power and skills even more. You are not just networking with a mage, but with every mage that mage has networked with.

New skills are created in the game by genetic algorithm, so that your skills combine with other skill-types in your tree to create unique powers. Fire mages that associate with water mages develop steam magic. Stone mages that associate with Air Mages develop Rain-of-Stones.

When a new social connection is made, there is a price to be paid dependent on the size and power of the connection being attempted. A single newbie mage connecting with another newbie mage would be tasked with something equivalent to slaying a rabbit. A newbie mage trying to form a connection with a mage with ten nodes in his network would receive a more challenging quest, and at some point the quest will be beyond their reach until the two networks have achieved some parity.

As the player increases their network, the will bump into different factions whose in-game goals make conflict with their own. Making connections across faction lines can cause a tree to be poisoned, and the affected nodes must be healed or pruned, or they may splinter and form their own faction. Poisoned factions have their own sinister magic.

Maintaining the tree is the key to power. Coming up with a visual interface for maintaining your social tree is the challenge. My hunch is that it is a fractal explorer, that allows you to move through levels of detail in the tree without overwhelming you at any one level, allowing the players to monitor the health and strength of connections, and see the network influences that guide their skill development.

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.