One of the memes floating around in the tabletop RPG design-o-sphere is that it’s desirable to reduce the “social footprint” of games. The thinking goes that busy people have a hard time fitting gaming into their lives, so when games require things like learning rules, regular attendance at scheduled sessions, outside-the-session prep-work, etc., it makes it less likely for the game to happen. While this argument is compelling, we shouldn’t assume that reducing barriers to play is a purely beneficial strategy that has no tradeoffs. In addition to affecting which tools are available from the game designer’s toolbox, the “inconvenience” of getting a game to happen can itself have an impact on play. I recently read a psychology research paper that illustrates an interesting phenomenon.

In the experiment I want to highlight, the subjects were asked to participate in a short test to measure performance on some mental tasks. Different subjects were scheduled to take the test at three different times (selected to be mildly, moderately, or extremely inconvenient). After the students were told about the test and when they’d be taking it (without knowing the scheduled time was a variable) they filled out a survey indicating how important or interesting taking the test would be, and how satisfied they expected to be once they completed it:

As you can see in the chart, subjects in the late-but-not-too-late condition rated taking the test as slightly more important and meaningful to them. The paper puts forward the theory that when we are exposed to short-term costs between us and our goals, our brains use techniques like magnifying the significance of the long-term goal to make sure we get past the bump in the road, but we only do this within the realm of the possible and don’t bother if the short-term cost seems too high. Since the subjects subconsciously anticipated difficulty staying motivated to perform at the moderately inconvenient time, their brains helped them out by deciding the overall task was comparatively more important than their less-inconvenient-time or it’s-so-late-it’s-a-lost-cause peers who were evaluating the exact same task. And here’s the even more interesting result:

You’d probably expect average performance on the test to decline based on the later times (presumably people are more tired later), but the average performance by the moderately-inconvenient-time group was actually slightly higher than for the earlier group. Using some statistical analysis, the experimenters say that there was a negative effect on performance relative to time as you’d expect, but there was also a positive effect on performance relative to how important and significant the subject considered the test (presumably they try harder). Since the moderately-inconvenient subjects thought the task was more important their increased motivation compensated, or more than compensated, for the lateness of the task. Obviously low-inconvenience is better than high-inconvenience, but comparing low and moderate inconvenience may not be so straightforward.

Naturally all the standard caveats apply about the risks of generalizing from an experiment like this and applying it to a different field like RPG design, but I think it’s worthwhile to consider whether trying to minimize the “social footprint” might risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. When there’s a little resistance to making a game happen the players are probably playing the game with a slightly different mindset compared to players who face no inconvenience, and that can easily have an impact on what techniques, systems, procedures, etc., will work well for those players. This isn’t to say that designers shouldn’t consider the importance of right-sizing the “social footprint” of their games, just to caution that a simplistic “less is better” strategy may not be optimal.