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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →A digital game session is worth sharing when it gives people something they did together that they can talk about afterward: a problem that needed coordination, a role that differed from someone else’s, a physical or spatial situation, or a moment worth watching. Genre is a weak predictor of that. Design research on social play points instead to how a session is structured and how players relate to one another. It does not offer a tested formula that guarantees a memorable session, and the evidence behind it has clear limits, covered below.
Social play is wider than shared competition
Most people picture social gaming as several players competing in the same match. The 2023 systematic review “Social gaming: A systematic review,” by David Gonçalves, Pedro Pais, Kathrin Gerling, Tiago Guerreiro, and André Rodrigues, uses a broader definition. It treats social gaming as digital game experiences involving more than one person, with attention to the social elements among players and/or spectators. The paper appeared in Computers in Human Behavior, volume 147, article 107851, in October 2023 (DOI 10.1016/j.chb.2023.107851). Its corpus of 263 publications was gathered in February 2021, so it describes the literature as it stood then, not the current games market.
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The review’s own summary of the field is the most direct statement of the idea:
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“Digital games often constitute a shared activity where people can spend time together, communicate and socialize.”
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Under that definition, a session can be social without any head-to-head competition. Cooperation, asymmetric roles, shared control, a physical setting, or an audience can each make the experience social.
Why genre tells you less than session structure
Genre labels still dominate how studies are organized. In the review’s corpus, 57 studies covered MMO games, 34 covered RPGs, and 28 covered MMORPGs. These are counts of studies in that literature, not market-share figures or estimates of how many games exist. The review also found that some genres and asynchronous multiplayer were less explored than the mainstream categories.
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A more useful way to describe a session is by how people are set up to affect each other. The table below lists the dimensions that recur in the studies discussed here. None is a scoring system, and neither end of any axis is inherently better.
| Dimension | The question to ask | What it changes in the session | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| Co-located or remote | Do players share a physical space or meet through a mediated game environment? | Shared space gives players something to point at, move around, and react to together. | Co-located mobile games study (Goddard, Garner, and Jensen, around 2016) |
| Synchronous or asynchronous | Do players act together in real time, or affect each other across separate sessions? | Real-time play creates immediate reactions; asynchronous play shifts the social contact to later turns. | Review, noting that asynchronous multiplayer was less explored |
| Collaborative, competitive, or mixed goals | Does progress depend on joint action, opposition, or both? | Interdependence determines whether players must negotiate, share information, or rely on each other. | Review, on interdependence and varied goal structures |
| Symmetric or asymmetric roles | Do players hold the same information and actions, or different ones? | Differences in role or knowledge create the need to coordinate and talk. | Co-located mobile games study |
| Player-only or spectator-inclusive | Can people take part by watching, commenting, or shaping play without controlling the game? | Non-controlling participants become part of the event rather than bystanders. | Review; party-game study (around 2018) |
| Screen-centered or embodied/spatial | Does play involve movement, touch, location, or the surrounding environment? | Bodies and places become part of the interaction, not only input devices. | Review; social exertion games study (around 2017) |
What makes sessions talkable
The studies discussed in the review describe several recurring design choices. Each one gives players a specific thing to coordinate, perceive, or discuss.
Interdependence and asymmetry
A study of co-located mobile games examines four games and discusses mobility, public-space co-location, spatial and bodily interaction, and asymmetrical information or interaction. When one player can see something the others cannot, or can act where the others cannot, the group has to describe, guide, and check on each other. That exchange is often the part people remember. The study presents asymmetry as a way to create social play, not as a guaranteed result.
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Space and the body
The review found frequent attention to location-based and movement-based interaction, gaze, facial expressions, feet, touch, and physiological input. These are approaches researchers have explored, not features a player needs in order to have a good session. A session that uses the room, the street, or a player’s body gives the group a shared physical reference point. Social exertion research goes further, proposing “bodily interplay” and separating parallel play, where players do similar things side by side, from interdependent play, where one player’s movement changes what another can do (Microsoft Research, around 2017).
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A study on game-control distribution, published in AI & Society around 2009 (DOI 10.1007/s00146-009-0245-y), compared configurations of who controlled what. It reports that a partly distributed-control condition produced the greatest experienced engagement among the configurations tested. The authors tie this to balancing social play with autonomy: players need enough control to feel responsible for outcomes, but enough sharing to need one another. This is one study with its own configurations and participants. It does not show that shared control improves every session.
Spectators as participants
“A Three Person Poncho and a Set of Maracas,” a DiGRA Digital Library paper from around 2018, describes designing Ola De La Vida, a co-located social play game. The paper discusses community-building through game design and curation and describes semi-spectatorship, in which people who are not directly controlling the game still take part in it, blurring the boundary between player and audience. Watching becomes a role with its own contribution, which can make a session worth talking about even for people who did not press a button.
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Where novelty helps and where it does not
The review notes frequent interest in hybrid forms and unconventional technologies. Novelty can make a session distinctive, but it does not guarantee social value. A new controller or sensor changes what players can do; it does not by itself create a reason to coordinate, talk, or watch. The more useful question is whether the unfamiliar input changes what people must do together.
The same mechanic can also land differently depending on who plays and where. The review identifies limited attention to player diversity and context. A co-located movement game that works for one group of adults may be awkward for another group, or for players with different physical abilities, and the reviewed literature does not establish how those differences play out across many groups.
What the evidence does and does not establish
The evidence is strongest as a description of design dimensions and as a map of what has been studied. It is weaker on outcomes. Among the reviewed works, 82 included at least one play session in a mediated setting, and 20 included at least one in an unmediated setting. These are counts of studies, not separate participant totals, and they show that most of the literature studied controlled or mediated sessions. The review also found that established measures of social outcomes were scarce.
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That means three things are safe to say. Social play includes many session structures beyond shared competition. Several design choices, including asymmetry, shared control, bodily interaction, and spectator roles, have been studied as ways to shape how groups interact. And the evidence for specific outcomes such as friendship, community, or prosocial behavior is thin. No source in this body establishes that a particular game produces those results for all players.
A checklist for judging a session before you play it
- Does each person have a job that depends on someone else, or can everyone succeed alone?
- Does the session use a shared space, the surrounding environment, or players’ bodies in a way that everyone can see and respond to?
- Is there a role for people who are not controlling the game, such as calling out information, guiding, or reacting?
- Does the control scheme leave each player enough autonomy to feel responsible, while still requiring them to share something?
- Would the session still make sense if the novel input device were removed? If not, check whether the novelty changes the coordination or only the look.
- Does the group’s context, including ages, physical abilities, and familiarity with the setting, fit the mechanic?
Use these questions as a way to describe a session, not as a score. The studies do not support ranking one structure above another.
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