What if we design our games to be more socially meaningful?
Even better; Why don't we design our social networks to be more socially meaningful? But first we need to consider deconstruction and re-engineering them as robust against the predatory environment of corporate and political exploitation.
There is sooooo much going wanting in the areas of privacy, autonomy anti-fragility and economic rationalization and yes... user relevance and psycho/socio-ergonomics would fall into line in and around all that, but I do wish we could see the priority of undermining the existing tyranny of greed and power requires restructuring and winding back the entrenched dependencies on existing infrastructure and modalities. Walled gardens, phishing scams, Non-hierarchical network topology held captive and dependent upon on DNS and such hierarchical protocols and network topologies. Websites are forever usurping desktops and re-inventing the center and now apps all vying to be the new centrist portal/platform and gateway to corner a market if not a monopoly.
If these fundamentals are not addressed there seems little point in meddling with top down procedural micro-management strategies designed to preempt the behavioral dynamics of players and bloat the front end interface codebase with more to manage in the eminent transition. I think we are over due for universal back-end overhaul and time to dial back the development of interface and the codebases of existing infrastructure dependency is somewhere from imminent to well over due.
There may be many futile efforts put into redundancies far too late in the day. Cutting of losses and looking for the efficiency in fundamentals, may call for broad depreciation of 'legacy' code still in service. A couple to a few years down the track the dawning of a new paradigm will reward us and pay back our sacrifice.
Having said that, I do actually like these ideas and not just for the game environment but for the plethora of dis jointed incompatible social apps/networks that avoid cross pollination and standardization of integration (compatibility/interoperability/profile-portability) and devour user contribution and conscription of their extended contact base as a commodity to exploit them with, rather than a commodity they should be rewarded for providing the platform.
Open platforms of interoperable networking could be made to usurp the walled garden or to force them to segregate their platform and account code from the profile/user data base which they could hold in an encrypted and non-permanent form. Revoke their key and destroy their record of the user profile. Now they will play as responsible competitive providers for independent users with rewards to trade/revoke conditional. Now all these transaction provisions to describe the environment become relevant to the developers and the need to be feature and compatibility relevant cross-platform and retain profile agnostic interoperability, would drive an arms race in this customer centrist marketplace and a social experience of true value might rise from the source that matters.