Social interactions for a remote, digital audience?

I'm curious how others have used Storyline or have thought about using Storyline to promote social learning and social situations between remote learners?

 

At least with the audiences I've largely helped in my time as an instructional designer, remote workers have been an outstanding majority.

I was part of a team that developed a "two-player" eLearning, each person played the role of either a caller or a customer service representative, and the course was structured to guide them through the call in discrete steps. It was one eLearning with two pathways--cooperative Battleship in some ways. Learners would call each other over the phone and navigate the scenarios together. The Storyline course was essential to the entire thing working so well and really enabled the social interaction in the first place.

I currently have in development a three-player resource management game, each player shipwrecked on a distinct island in an archipelago. All three need to work together to build a new ship and continue their voyage.

Winning requires the players exchange resources between their games/eLearnings/islands. So how to exchange resources without paying for and configuring a server?

A "courier" system--a popup form in the game into which the player says what they want to send, how much, and to which island to send it. That generates an encrypted short-code for the sender to give to the recipient. When the intended recipient enters that code into their receive-courier popup, the "sent" resources are added to the inventory. Some additional JavaScript maintenance adds the code to a list blocking any duplicates, and additional encryption when codes are generated ensures they can only be used by their intended recipients.

It's shaping up to be a very effective team-building exercise (the principal design goal) made possible through the text input objects and a little JavaScript, and so (to restate) I'm curious how others have used Storyline or have thought about using Storyline to promote social learning and social situations between remote learners?