Scaling presential (in-person) play and the threshold of trust
- Tiz Creel
- 14 hours ago
- 4 min read
Presential play
Playforms such as folk games, toys, tabletop, live action role-playing (larp), or team sports are constrained by the physical, cognitive, and social limits of human interaction. These limits shape not only what kinds of play are possible, but also how groups generate trust, coherence, and shared meaning. While small groups can rely on familiarity, informal coordination, and unmediated trust, growing groups inevitably encounter a threshold at which those mechanisms break down and must be supplemented or replaced by external structures, mediations, and forms of authority. The tension is what I refer to as the problem of scale: the point at which the intimate, trust-based qualities of presential play become structurally incompatible with scale, needing new sociocultural mechanisms that fundamentally alter the conditions and quality of play. From a design perspective, even the addition or absence of a single player can reshape the run of play.
A defining aspect of presential playforms is their limited, controlled player count. Small groups can operate without a formal structure, using personal communication instead. From a sociological perspective, all social groups have a critical threshold at which informal mechanisms break down, and external systems emerge to maintain, oversee, and regulate social interaction, thereby replacing informal social bonds (Uzzi et al. 2005, Monge 2003). In play, as in the ordinary world (our immediate reality), heavily mediated player interactions are designed to compensate for the fundamental lack of trust in large-scale groups, where unmediated trust cannot be realistically sustained, and trust is often placed in the system rather than in social relations or the make-believe.
In the context of presential playforms, having one more or fewer players can significantly impact the flow of play. Applying Metcalfe's Law (1980) to social play, the number of one-on-one connections grows quadratically as the group size increases (see Fig.1). The number of unique dyadic (one-on-one) relationships increases proportionately to the squared input size (Doyle 2016). In a group of five, there are ten individual connections (relationships); adding a single person to that group would increase the connections to fifteen.
Greek philosopher Plato discusses the ideal population size for a polis (city-state), suggesting a population limit of 5,040 landowners in the context of Classical Athens (Plato 1970). Plato believed that the number of people in cities should be limited by law to ensure consistency and comparability among them. More recently, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar (2010) proposed a cognitive limit to the number of stable social relationships a person can maintain. Dunbar's number suggests a limit of 150 (see Fig. 2a) meaningful relationships of regular contact and cooperation (Dunbar 2010, West et al. 2020). Dunbar understood the layers of relationships as ripples in a pond, where the quality, closeness, and strength decrease as the circles get larger (see Fig. .2b).
Layer | Relations | Description | Concept |
1s | 5 | Loved ones, intimate connections, high-trust relationships. | Support clique |
2nd | 15 | Close connections and regular contact. | Sympathy groups |
3rd | 50 | Friends, valuable connections, and less emotional closeness. | Affinity group |
4th | 150 | Meaningful contacts, varying contact frequency. The layers of intimacy are nested within this layer. | Fully active network |
5th | 500 | Contact, but not the core network | Acquaintances |
6th | 1500 | Can recognise, but no significant contact. | Recognisable faces |
7th | 5040 | Plato’s ideal population size for a polis (Plato 1970). | Ideal democracy |
Fig. 2a. Breakdown of Dunbar's exploration of groupings & the layers of intimacy.
Replications of Dunbar's analysis using updated data yielded a wide range of estimates, notably those by McCarty et al. (2001) and Lindenfors et al. (2021). The evaluations concluded that the cognitive limit might not be precisely derivable due to variations in cultural, generational, technological, and individual factors, making it difficult to determine an exact number or range that encompasses all human experiences. However contested the number may be, there is a consensus on the existence of a cognitive limit to the number of personal and social relations an individual can maintain. The Dunbar number is not strictly about trust, but the capacity to know each person and how they relate to others. A group of 12 to 15 people is sometimes referred to in sociology as a sympathy group, that is the size in most team sports, the number of members on a jury, or the number of Apostles (Dunbar 2010: 32). However, the number of people an individual deeply cares about will likely be smaller within the inner layers of the ripple. These sociological thresholds show that scaling is not simply the addition of players but a transformation of trust within the limits of what is administratively and structurally possible.
Scaling presential play reveals the complex interplay between intimacy and trust in collective human activity. Small groups can rely on unmediated social bonds and informal communication. However, as group size expands, these mechanisms erode and must be supplemented or, at times, replaced by external systems of authority. From Plato’s ideal polis to Dunbar’s cognitive limits, social theory has long recognised the thresholds that shape human collectivity.
This is a text overview of the presentation "Playing the Part: Exploring the Civics of Empire LRP" for the symposium "Evolution of Story III: Having a Larp 2025" at Southampton Solent University.
Resources
Doyle, C. (2016). Metcalfe’s Law. Oxford University Press.
Dunbar, R. (2010). How many friends does one person need? Faber & Faber.
Lindenfors, P. et al. (2021). ‘Dunbar’s number’ deconstructed. Biology Letters.
Plato (2016). Laws. Cambridge University Press.
McCarty, C. et al. (2001). Comparing two methods for estimating network size. Human Organization.
Uzzi, B., & Spiro, J. (2005). Collaboration and creativity: The small world problem. American Journal of Sociology.
West, B. J. et al. (2020). Relating size and functionality in human social networks. PNAS.
Monge, P. R., & Contractor, N. S. (2003). Theories of communication networks. Oxford University Press.
By Tiz Creel ©2024
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