From the experiences I’ve had from games, especially cooperation and multi-player games, what many people enjoyed was being a part of a group. Where they can freely contribute, and receive instant gratification from others, grow as a whole, and progress as a whole.
This idea of providing for a group/guild/clan/etc, even if it is a one off group randomly organised every time you open the game, is similar in nature to how improvisational theatre works. When your partner play along, all player’s experiences become drastically more satisfying, and players find each other more entertaining to play with. Adopting this style as a player helps you get accepted into such groups, emphasizing the social aspects of games.
As a designer, this behaviour is a very powerful tool that can be used to simulate, and improve the players experiences of joy, satisfaction, acceptance and immersion by designing simple, and easy to use social features, and features that require people to cooperate. Improvisational theatre concentrates on techniques which help bring people to cooperate in this manner, placing their mindset in that direction. Yes, definitely these techniques can be considered and adopted to promote this behaviour.
