Having deep friendships is a necessary part of a happy life, and the importance of friendships is shown in various research. The term, “Friendship Games” is a relatively new genre of games that aims to create cooperative video-games that utilizes systems to intentionally design for building deeper friendships among players. To explore this genre further, this study will investigate game design patterns for friendship formation and how to apply it to cooperative video-games. By applying other studies of friendship formation and positive/negative feedback loops, an iterative framework for one dimension of friendship formation was developed to illustrate how reinforcing and balancing relationships can intentionally create consensual reciprocity between players in cooperative online video-games. The extent to which the proposed framework can be used is discussed, however tests of the system with a real video-game scenario is needed for any real validation of the system.

Detective stories in games have long been a heavily used inspiration source and setting for games, and it is indeed a fitting genre at first glance with its clearly defined set of expectations, rules, and type of storytelling relying on uncovering the past. It is curious then, that until recently, most detective games have followed a more traditional adventure game structure, with little emphasis on actual investigation in the player’s actions, but where the player more acts as a proxy for the plot to follow its course. However, in recent years, a number of games have shown a tendency to shift this balance, and push the bulk of the detective work onto the players themselves, to leave them with an inscrutable mystery to slowly uncover over the course of the game, to decipher the story of the crime in their mind. This paper will investigate a few of these games as well as compare with literature on traditional detective stories to understand how detective games have typically been a different type of detective story all together, which is crucial to understanding how we can make the player the detective instead of an observer of a detective.