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Fair Play Summit: Kind Games: Designing for Prosocial Multiplayer
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.nnInternal 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.nnWe 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.
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