Building an Elephant
By: Solon Teal
Tags: Startup, Digital Experience Design, Reflections, Experience Design, Social

It’s a social adventure game

While this description inevitably launches a discussion of 30 minutes that generally ends with a “huh, maybe that could work,” I do believe it’s accurate. And, it’s the one that I as a former-introvert-now-ambivert-maybe-never-an-introvert am most excited by. Here’s a quick run down.

Social is supposed to be fun

What’s the point if we can’t have fun is one of my favorite pieces ever written by the late David Graeber. In it, he talks about how in our efforts to understand animals and nature we too often ascribe some transactional or strategic purpose to all of their interactions — forgetting that, often, all animals just want to play. This is especially true for humans, as we’re especially social. He writes:

“To exercise one’s capacities to their fullest extent is to take pleasure in one’s own existence, and with sociable creatures, such pleasures are proportionally magnified when performed in company.”

Too often in our current online social environments even when we are playing, or being goofy and silly, it is recorded in solitude and enjoyed by an invisible digital audience. Play requires everyone to be equally present and participate. It requires real time, synchronous interactions — and despite the wave of ‘audio only’ solutions, social play that promotes connection and authenticity really benefits from synchronous video. It’s not a requirement, but if it’s an option we should embrace it more.

Play also benefits from clear contextual rules and expectations. I see a lack of defined ‘low stakes, low transactional’ spaces, which reduces the opportunity for spontaneous play. In a world that is increasingly capitalizing on our engagement and freetime (e.g. monetizing our “passions”) and relentlessly obsessed with self improvement and positivity, it becomes easy to pressure ourselves to be hyper transactional (“there needs to be a point to this interaction”) or engage in high stakes activity (“I really need this conversation to go well if I want to have a friend/significant other/employer/etc”). Yes, social status is a big driver of socialization, but so are things like being understood and acknowledged for the imperfect beings that we all are. Needing to portray a specific persona or position ourselves in a way to be transactionally successful is not just exhausting but dehumanizing. Purposeful play is a must if we want to make real connections and relationships.

Exciting social adventures await us across humanity

Many of us dream of being adventurers or being the “first” to do something. Increasingly, our notion of adventure and uniqueness is moving digital and will radically change. Partly because historically the “first” person often wasn’t really the “first” (e.g. Christopher Columbus and a long litany of similar historical not-actual-firsts) but also because what is happening online can be wildly different from . The internet has turbocharged this — being the first person amongst the 5 billion and counting humans that use the internet is statistically a challenge. The rise of NFTs highlights the appeal of uniqueness. This isn’t to say that we can’t still have exciting adventures. If anything, I think our true adventure is just getting started — understanding humanity for who we really are.

To prognosticate, our future adventures may be those in which we interact and engage with people who are fundamentally different from us. Synchronously interacting with them in a safe way, with clear social rules is something that can allow us to begin to understand one another. While we all think of ourselves as a model human on some level, someone somewhere is as put off by us as we are by them. Looking at the world now, that’s mutual distaste is leading to radicalization and destabilizations. That can’t sustainably continue in a world that is only going to get even more connected.

These future adventures would therefore be one in which we gear up like a heroic character and interact with people radically different from us on various dimensions from somewhere across humanity. They could be something like convergence/divergence experiences wherein a small group of strangers are sorted into a social scenario. Each of them have a consistent characteristic to enable a level of trust (perhaps a very similar life path), but everything else is as different as possible (gender, political beliefs, number of siblings, etc). Like a quest, they would be tasked (by themselves, or perhaps a ‘game engine’) with a successful interaction with their opposite. Enforceable rules would promote some level of behavior and reduce the all-to-common troll experience we have online. We’ll become real students of humanity and actual truth-seekers. After all, if we want to change the world we need to first understand the ideas held by others in our current world.

We can never stop forming new relationships

Relationship columnist Dan Savage said: “every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn’t.” That quote lives fully rent free in my head whenever a cherished relationship changes because of life stage, location, etc. As we age, we all fall out of touch with people we knew when we were younger — the number of relationships we have peak when we are 25. We lack many of the daily interactions that made up so many of our loose connection relationships (especially with Covid which has “Erased entire categories of friends”). Covid has also catalyzed a significant movement of people, upending existing in-person relationships — 10% of Americans have moved in some way according to Pew. Once we begin to have children, enter long term relationships, get new jobs, pass away…our relationships become looser and looser.

This becomes a profound challenge when we have fallen out of social shape and suddenly need that social structure — and the skills to build them. Unfortunately, in those moments, we can suddenly have a formerly critical relationship entirely disappear with nothing to fill the void. If a friend moves away, hopefully we have other people we can spend time with. If we need a new job, hopefully we know someone who works where we want to work. If we need someone to have a good conversation with, hopefully that’s accessible. Trust is fundamental to all of those needs, and creating trust time. Needs for more trusted relationships aren’t just abstract needs, but are becoming increasingly urgent for millions of Americans every day. Only 13% of Americans report having 10+ close friends, down from 33% 30 years ago. 50% of adult Americans haven’t made a new friend in the last 5 years. While this is partly a uniquely American phenomenon, there are parallels across most heavily digitized countries.

Such a relationship task that is never ending — a Sisyphean task even — requires that the journey be satisfying. Otherwise, maintaining focus and discipline becomes incredibly difficult. Like Peloton, Soul Cycle, and other modern workout communities, making the process itself an experience helps us forget that we’re working on an arduous task. Why should anyone keep using dating apps or attend networking/friend making events if the actual process isn’t enjoyable? Ask anyone who is looking for a new relationship and they’re likely to share deep existential struggles and frustration. In a world of increasing distractions, often algorithmically calibrated to grab our attention we should demand better experiences on our social journey — we never know how long it may last between checkpoints.

Technology can actually increase intimacy

Up until 2019 I was generally dogmatic that social had to be in person. The joys of designing and facilitating an experience where you can palpably feel the human energy change is an intense hit of oxytocin. I’ve since become open to instances where I think digital interactions can not just equal but be better than IRL interactions. For example, if you’re hosting a party you can’t change the theme, decorations, and venue in milliseconds if a certain collection of guests arrive — you can do that digitally. Furthermore, we often have one-off conversations resulting in an insight or realization — how powerful would it be if the next time we were social we met someone that had recently had that same epiphany, and we could discuss it together. Imagine if we were to apply the digital lens to all of our social gatherings and really rethink the purpose of each. How can we achieve the social purpose, while only leveraging digital tools?

Inversely, trying to recreate IRL experiences in the same way online leads to failure. We’ve seen from the pandemic that putting 15 people on a video call for an unorganized happy hour is not satisfying. For example, eye gazing and physical touch are incredibly powerful tools for IRL connection events — they rapidly create intimacy and trust. They generally fail online, however…so what can replace them? Approaching this from a digital-only perspective may lead to equivalent, digital native tools to promote trust like mutually sharing private instagram DMs, browser history, or other generally hidden information. We need to enable the design of new interactions and experiences that are digitally native that in no way could ever be replicated online. That’s what the social adventure game of the future has to look like.