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View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by day, time, pass type, topic, and format. With this Session Viewer, you can view session and speaker details for Game Developers Conference 2024.

You will be able to build your schedule with the GDC Mobile App. The GDC 2024 app will be available for download in Apple Apps and Google Play late February 2024.

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Fair Play Summit: Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer

Daniel Cook  (Studio Co-director, Spry Fox)

Location: Room 209, South Hall

Date: Monday, March 18

Time: 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass, Summits Pass, Expo Pass, Audio Pass, Indie Games Summit Pass - Get your pass now!

Topic: Advocacy

Format: Session

Vault Recording: Video

Audience Level: Intermediate

What does it look like to proactively design our games to facilitate positive human relationships? Games built on a foundation of kind aesthetics can deliver greater player satisfaction, greater long term engagement, and richer human experiences.

Internal studio research increasingly shows that social features facilitating friendship are highly predictive of long term retention in online games. Despite this, many games are based on single player or competitive gameplay and only add friendship-focused social features as an afterthought.

We define kind games as multiplayer games designed from the start with systems that deliberately promote prosocial behavior. We observe this as an emerging design trend in hit multiplayer games like Sky: Children of Light, Sea of Thieves, Final Fantasy 14, Death Stranding and even distinctly uncozy games like Elden Ring.

Takeaway

In this talk we hope to jumpstart the conversation by covering practical tools, constraints and real world examples. We'll arm you with ideas on how social first design should be a top business priority, not an afterthought. You should leave inspired by the grand opportunity to design multiplayer prosocial games that bring out the best of humanity.

Intended Audience

The target audience for this includes social systems designers, creative directors and anyone who believes that games can help players thrive.



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