Comment by PaulHoule
2 hours ago
Yeah, I think those games have more potential than most people think. I love voting mechanics (spent a lot of time on ranking systems) and some have good stories ranging from "the heartwarming story of Nikki exploring a continent, making friends and proving her mad skills" to "a vicious fight for survival in an ancient court"
What's a good voting system? I remember checking out Dress to Impress (not a mobile but an incredibly popular Roblox game), and it had a somewhat unpleasant, imo, voting system -- players vote for each other's outfits and the score is a sum of the scores your co-players' gave you which incentivizies players to give everyone the lowest score. The game tries to "punish" this behavior by detecting "unfair" voters and lowering the weight of their votes, but I feel like you could tweak the original incentives instead by changing the mechanic. Having to rank outfits instead of giving each outfit a score could work I think? But there are probably other problems I'm missing. I dnn't play too many mutliplayer games.
(On the other hand, while I believe thinking about "gaming" the ranking takes away from the fun of the game, Dress to Impress is massively popular, so maybe this frustration is what makes it popular. IDK if kids play it because there are no competitors in the genre or because some competitive toxicity is addictive.)
Well I'm interested in voting theory from the viewpoint of political science and also from the viewpoint of developing ranking systems. It's actually a pretty depressing topic because you can easily come to the conclusion that the public doesn't have an interest at all.
In short, pairwise rankings are real and comparable between people whereas different people might use a scale differently. It's a difficult problem to deal with "i like the bagel shop a little bit more than the rice bowl restaurant but the party member who has celiac's opinion matters more than mine" See
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Thurstone/Thurstone_1927f.html
now if you have N options you don't have to have everyone evaluate N(N-1) pairs because preferences are correlated and should be transitive. There are many algorithms, like Elo and the methods in that paper that can be used to run tournaments and compute scores. The game Covet uses pairwise ranking and I think gets good scores.
To get back to social decision theory, it's probably not good for players to be in a team for purposes of winning and losing. Like I think sharing clothes with your friends is a really fun mechanic (might make you want to really buy or work for something!) but if people can help or hurt their friends you get into the whole can of worms of coalitions in N-person games.
Fascinating. Thank you or sharing.
I just quickly tried Covet and I can imagine how the act of comparing and picking one of the two options can feel fun. I can see myself just voting on outfits in the game without creating my own when I need some really simple "mindless" fun. Not a productive effect but also not addictive enough AFAIK to be a big problem.
I think teams can work as a concept but you need to design them with a great deal of care so that mechanics are pro-social and fascilitate friendships -- there's a nice article about it: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/game-design-patterns-fo...