James Baillie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Connections between people are vital to the movement of information and the creation of social status and identity in modern and medieval societies alike. In premodern worlds, the importance of personal networks in brokering relationships and information flows was greater than it is today, with fewer alternative ways to move information before the advent of mass printing and media.
Social networks are often not utilised extensively in medieval and medieval-fantasy role-playing games, despite their potential in allowing for dynamic and realistic-feeling interactions in the societies portrayed. This is in large part because the narrative impression of a network is often sufficient from the player’s perspective, whereas the considerable additional work to model that network creates a complex dynamic system for developers to handle.
For a case study let’s look at the first act of Baldur’s Gate 3. Here’s a social network graph showing attested relationships and shared actions between non-player characters from the first segment of play, up to the Druids’ Grove:
And here’s the graph but with the addition of nodes for particular factional groups – the tiefling refugees, the druids, and so on:
As we see, most of these people connect in small clusters, and the overall factions aren’t easy to make out – until we represent them directly, when suddenly it’s clear how the factions group and connect together.
We see, therefore, two key features here. First, the network is far more driven by faction than direct connection. Rather than networks between individuals forming social and political groupings, the group is created and shown visually and narratively (the druids and tieflings have distinct visual motifs). This implies to the player that there are networks within. Rather than faction proceeding from network, network is implied by faction.
Second, connections not to the player character have to be de-emphasised. There are clearly opposing schools of thought among the druids, for example, but these are provided as individual viewpoints more than as true factions, and their proponents are not connected in a networked way. Faction leaders, too, do not sit centrally connecting their followers, but act as a broker to the player character on behalf of the group as a separate entity. The player becomes the sole broker and active actor.
The game thus implies networks while providing an intentionally incomplete, player-perspective view on them. This faction-first approach works especially well in high pressure situations where characters have a relatively ‘apolitical’ goal, but reduces the potential depth of the social game and the modelling of faction formation and change.
There are good reasons for not heavily encoding networks into games: they’re hard to make interact with scripted content and add heavy complexity. Nonetheless encoded character networks in RPGs could allow players to interact with features of pseudo-medieval societies that otherwise go unexpressed. The ways that leaders broker between local and central power, or the influences other than ideology on faction formation, are key examples – but there may be many more to explore.
Thanks for a fantastic paper, James. Despite being always thrilled with SNA and fantasy RPGs separately, I had never thought about applying the former to the latter. I wonder, are you aware of any RPGs where someone else but the player functions as broker and active actor (in a non-scripted way), or do you have any thoughts about the potential for something like that to be made? Obviously we have Crusader Kings where the player is a network broker in a world full of network brokers, but with “pure” RPGs it seems more challenging.
I can’t think of much there, partly because RPGs tend to be very scripted: the number of “moving parts” that the player is the moving force for is very high and the “background model” is kept low because, in a sense, why add a bunch of complexity that isn’t something the player is doing? More sandboxy games like M&B, Skyrim or some roguelikes probably have more potential here in some ways. It’d be interesting to play more with problems like “this NPC died, we need a replacement” or “I need to be put in touch with a cloth merchant/a rogue/a potential spouse” and then actually have a trait that various characters share which that person needs so you could find and slot someone in slightly more dynamically to the task. You could then also have that be more competitive if there’s an NPC rival trying to do similar tasks, or model the failure state as “I was too slow and the person who asked me found someone else anyway”, or similar.
I think more standard RPGs could have varied-but-scripted options for things to add a brokerage element in as well: there’s bits of that in BG3 wherein I think e.g. which party member gets kidnapped in Act 3 has a random element, and I think even having quests which think more explicitly about the player as a broker in an existing social structure could be used to highlight some of those real social dynamics without making the system itself fully dynamic.
I am hoping to have some interesting potential for lateral non-player social dynamics developing around you in my own game The Exile Princes and that’s something I’m planning to work on in my final development block this summer – I’m planning to release before the end of the year. So watch this space!
Fantastic, James. Interesting thoughts all around, but I can see the argument for M&B being perhaps the closest we have in some ways.
Also definitely intrigued by The Exile Princes!
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I wonder if RPGs (and particularly, fantasy RPGs)’ propensity to use NPCs as tools for worldbuilding is to blame for this faction-centric approach. Josh Sawyer once said (in a post-mortem to Deadfire) about how party member act as a human interface between the player and the interests of the fantastical factions (whence the need for said factions to be represented in the party).
I also wonder if non-fantastic, strictly historical games fare better in this regard. “Pentiment” notably does: even though there are factions (the Abbey, the city, the farmers) we think about characters in terms of their personal/social relationships, rather than allegiances. I don’t recall enough of “Kingdom Come: Deliverance” to say if it fits the profile either.
Any other historical RPG comes to mind?
I think regardless of fantasy/history, it’s perhaps more about how much storytelling you decide to give the player. You can cut back on that by either restricting your scale and character palette, or by not having as much world depth and letting the player run on their own assumptions more. I’m not sure that it’s necessarily true that historicised games are easier to do this with, except in that historical RPGs tend to have slightly more restricted scales of what’s going on in various ways and don’t necessarily ask that the player get invested in a ton of big-scale stuff.
BG3 for example gives you the Githyanki succession and war, the fate of the Dead Three gods, the Grand Design and the Ilithid Empire, a huge plot around plans to create an ultra-Vampire, a scheming Devil trying to end the Blood War: the scale is very large! I think few historical RPGs would ask you to jump into the power politics of several different countries at once, plus the theology of several religious movements across them, plus some other cultural movements, simultaneously. (Obviously it’s not purely historical but if you look at AC: Odyssey it actually does try and do the whole Peloponnesian war and drops you into Greek society at a big scale – and it factionalises everything very sharply into literal red and blue teams to do so!) The smaller scope of something like Pentiment or even KC:D does help develop a smaller but more realistic social system.
Thanks for a great paper about a fascinating topic, James. I completely agree that network theory has a lot of unexplored potential, both for game development and game analysis.
Your example from BG3 is very interesting, and it made me realise how much of an instrumental/transactional relationship the player character actually has with the different groups in Act 1. The PC needs their help with The Brain-Thing and with investigating the Absolute, but apart from that you’re really just passing through without any real stake in any of the groups and their different relationships. (Except for Lae’zel and the Githyanki, of course.) I’d love to see a similar analysis done on a game like Planescape Torment, which (as far as I remember, it’s been a while) involves the player much more in the social fabric and power dynamics of the game world.
On a different point, I was wondering if you have any thoughts about how one might approach taking the concept of social networks and building a game around it specifically as the (or at least a) core mechanic? Whether RPG, strategy, management, or a blend of genres?
Planescape is a very good call! I might have a go at that sometime later in the year. And yes, I think perhaps rather than not having a stake I’d say your stake is meant to be ideological more than personal: you can do lots of stuff to help the Tieflings but you’re doing it because you believe it’s the right thing to do, not because of any personal connection. But I think even in RPGs where you have much more of a home base (Pillars of Eternity and the castle, say) there often isn’t really any sense that you need to learn and work with the social fabric around you.
I feel like a more social network focused game has to have quite a strong simulation element, and also ideally a strong role-playing element – in that there both needs to be a dynamic network you can interact with, and I think ideally a reason for you to see that network from an individual actor’s perspective or it becomes a sort of abstract puzzle rather than what players will understand as a social system. I wonder if a neat concept could be a sort of “social roguelike” where each run randomly generates its network and then a large part of the player’s task is to interact with that and help broker necessary social connections, perhaps racing/competing with a computer rival or two to do so?
Oh, a “social roguelike” is a super interesting idea. Maybe a game in which instead of having predefined factions, the player instead needs to explore a social network and use the connections to *build* factions or coalitions for some purpose (thus “faction proceeding from network”, as you put it). I think this could work with a lot of different settings, whether a royal court, or a parliamentary assembly, or even international negotiations. I’ll have to think about this some more.
Personally, I think Planescape tilts more to the side of power dynamics than that of social fabric. The relationships between characters, although complex, are still strongly determined by faction (Sensates, Godsmen, Chaosmen, etc).
That said, I might be misremembering things. It’s been a while since I played it.
Disco Elysium is quite similar – no surprise, given that Planescape was one of its main inspirations. In some ways, it’s the anti-Pentiment: a small-scale, character-driven story mired in historicity, but in which characters exist almost solely as mouthpieces for their factions. We don’t get the sense the people we meet belong to a cohesive social unit. Which is just as well, given that societal breakdown is one of the game’s central themes.
I’m just thinking out loud now, but there may be musings about this in Planescape too. After all, Sigil is everywhere and nowhere. It’s not really a place people go to grow old and nurture bonds. And the Lady of Pain’s ideology seems to support this: being true neutral means you’re on nobody’s side.
Thank you very much for the interesting paper. I understand that your work is more concerned with single-player RPGs and networks among NPCs. But I wanted to ask you about your perspective on MMO RPGs like World of Warcraft, where the game relies heavily on networks between players. How this player connectivity may have influenced the use of networks in other aspects of worldbuilding?
That’s a good question! I think there’s some interesting potential there, but it’s much more difficult to re-create a historical dynamic among groups of players in most MMO situations because they’re able to freely communicate as modern players, which effectively reinforces modernity in the dynamic, and also because players in an MMO almost always have to be basically generic “adventurers” or in similar positions, so there’s a greatly reduced specialisation level which wildly skews how networks can form.
If I was going to look at this in an MMO I’d pick something like Haven & Hearth which explicitly focuses on a sort of survival/building element – that could produce specialisation and cultural/factional dynamics that are emergent rather than the hardcoded factions of e.g. WoW. Sadly in the actual case of H&H, it’s close to being good for this except that any realistic emerging dynamics are effectively wrecked by the wildly over the top differentials in the combat and defence systems, which make play brutally over-aggressive (so rather than there being an incentive for weaker players to join factions or negotiate arrangements, they just get griefed constantly and drop out of the game, whereas some fighting specialists also plough so many hours into the game that they’re all-round gods and their destruction of the farming base of the economy is something they can actually simply ignore). So I think an MMO that could speak to this sort of thing would take some very clever design and I’m not aware of anything that quite fits the bill. I may be wrong though: I should stress that MMOs aren’t an area I’ve got really deep familiarity with!
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