How do you keep players happy in live service games without falling into the common traps of power creep or diluted rewards? An incredibly relevant topic even today. This report, courtesy of a collaboration with an outstanding team of industry vets, was a fascinating look into how cyclical progression loops can potentially be applied to solve those problems.

I had the privilege of working with a great group of designers to create a toolkit for developing social features. Our goal was to disambiguate the term "social" and create a more robust lexicon of terms to help designers communicate more effectively. Additionally, we created a tool based off of the Trust Spectrum to help teams more easily plan for and/or analyze the effect that any added social features can have on a game.

A collaboration between multiple designers which resulted in this in-depth discussion of how to design games that help strangers form positive pro-social relationships, and avoid designing in elements that are counter to that objective or socially destructive.

During my second visit to Project Horseshoe, my proposed topic was selected and our group analyzed how the game system structures and interpersonal dynamics of multiplayer games are often incompatible with the development of healthy friendships.

At my first Project Horseshoe, our group tackled a weighty topic around the potential of using games as a way to crowdsource solutions to large-scale, multifaceted, real-world problems, which resulted in this paper.

The theme of the GGJ was "heart", so we created a location-based mobile game where a spy is on the run from agents who are after them. The Spy is shown the locations of the Agents and has time to hide. Agents receive updates on the Spy's location and the frequency of the updates depend on the Spy's heart rate, which is based on the proximity of the Agents to the Spy. The Spy wins if they can evade capture until the session timer ends.