Social simulation in games: what is it and why isn’t there more of it?

Say It Like You Play It

In this episode, we talk about social simulation in games, taking as our starting point Mitu Khandaker's talk ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’. Hosts Dr. Ibi and Dr. Joe discuss:

• What’s a social sim?
• Autonomous behaviour versus authored branching stories
• Social simulation in tabletop games
• What are NPCs for?
• The multiple functions of communication and interaction in real life and games
• Games such as The Sims, Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, Dragon Age, Redshirts, and Ctrl.Alt.DEL

List of resources:

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. ‘Linguistics and poetics’. In T. Seboek (ed.) Style in Language, MIT Press, 350-377.

Available at: https://www.academia.edu/download/33061075/Jakobson_Eks_15_F12.pdf

Khandaker, Mitu. 2015 ‘Thinking about people: Designing games for social simulation’, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco.

Video available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haNy1kSHMt8&t=2591s

Mathiot, Madeleine & Garvin, Paul L. 1975. ‘The functions of language: A sociocultural view’, Anthropological Quarterly, 48(3). 148–156. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/3316921

Searle, John R. 1975. ‘A taxonomy of illocutionary acts.’ In K. Gunderson (ed.) Language, Mind, and Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.

Contains some strong (and other type types of) language.

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