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How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?
Not really. “Player vs. Environment” games are reasonably common. Fortnite actually started out as one before they realized most people wanted to do the competitive thing.
Most people try league (or overwatch, or an MMO, or whatever) to share a social experience with their friends. Once they’re in, the competitive mindset does the heavy lifting and keeps them playing. That doesn’t mean chasing a ranking—it means competing with other players. Most people don’t even play ranked mode!
Sometimes it doesn’t even require other players, because League does have popular PvE modes. There’s a decent contingent of players who only play those modes and never face other players. It takes all sorts.
Most of the common PvE games have features that introduce artificial social validation, RPGs being the most obvious, but even survival games have elements of accomplishing things whose value in real life is socially-mediated (“I built a base, farm, house; I found gold.”). Halo is single-player, but takes you through a guided story of social validation. It’s quite hard to think of one that doesn’t. You might consider that a skateboarding game could be fun without including social validation, but the interest surely lies in being able to do things which you know (intuitively or through skateboarding literacy) are impressive in real life. Civilization games, well, you are the leader of a civilization and future global hegemon.
Others have mentioned online chess, and that people used to (?) play against bots. But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating, and they may also play challenging bots if it means training against playing a real life friend in a week. Even a game like Heroes of the Storm, okay, if someone plays it offline they are still the hero who is killing people and destroying a base.
Actually, Halo has quite prominently featured multiplayer since its inception!
How does this theory handle abstract puzzlers like Baba is You? Or even pure math puzzles like Sudoku? Obviously, demonstrating clever puzzle-solving is worth some social status, but that’s not why people do these things. No, they do them because they’re fun.
I suspect curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle are embedded pretty deeply in our evolutionary history. Probably deeper than socially-mediated value.
I’m familiar with the Halo franchise. People played the solo campaign as the key feature of the game. There was also a split screen mode. But the campaign was enjoyable as a social validation simulator.
This was huge during the sudoku craze around 2004, reinforced by “sudoku is good for your brain”, but I don’t know how popular it still is. It has been squarely defeated (pun intended) by the much more social NYT games. I wonder if any kids play it. Perhaps even sudoku was socially-mediated: news says solving it means you are smart, also it’s popular, you feel smart and popular when you play and win.
I used to think this, and it falls in line with the Flow theory, but I’m starting to doubt it. Curiosity and attention seem to be profoundly shaped by social forces. Do crows solve puzzles for fun or do they do it for food?
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