[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Koster]

I made this post to the Star Wars Galaxies development board tonight
and thought that it merited tossing on mud-dev as well. For those
interested in the players' take on things, the original thread can
be found at:

  http://boards.station.sony.com/ubb/starwars/Forum3/HTML/013026.html

start quote--->
We've been having an interesting discussion here at work over the
last couple of days. We've been working on the layouts for various
buildings found in cities, and in the process found an interesting
philosophical question I'd like to share with you all.

To start with, let me ask you this question. It's a very arbitrary
question, and your answer will reveal a fair amount about you as a
player. It's an unfair question, of course, but ignore that, and
just go with your gut.

How much time do you think the average player should spend
socializing in SWG?  Meaning, as opposed to "playing" however you
define that--killing things, crafting, whatever. Chatting while
recovering from a fight counts; chatting while forming a group
counts too.

Got a number?

So numbers we arrived at among our team ranged from 3% all the way
up to 50%. I think it mostly reveals things about how different
people play the game--and also about how people define
socializing--and also about their memories (I flat out don't
*believe* the 3% people--that's a total of a few seconds every HOUR
spent chatting with people, on *average*. My take--nuh-uh, no
way. :) For the record, I was a 50% guy).

Why do I ask this? Because we have contradictory goals for the
game. We want to reduce downtime. But people get to know people
during downtime. That's when they socialize. That's when they make
friends. In fact, I'd go so far as to state that it is a Law of
Online World Design: Socialization Requires Downtime. The less
downtime, the less social your game will be.  And we ran headlong
into this while discussing interfaces for common municipal
structures.

Let's take a bank as an example. The question came up as to how you
would use a bank. It matters because of how we lay it out. If you
have to walk inside and use a computer terminal, then we need wide
doors and spacious interiors and lots of terminals. But we could
also make it so that you could use it anywhere inside the
structure--we'd get rid of the terminals, change the layout somewhat
based on the flow. Probably have many doors in, since people would
tend to stop at the doorway, which is the first place they can do
their transaction, and then turn around and leave.

Then we said to ourselves, "Wait a minute. We have a credit
economy. We could make it so that you used the bank from anywhere
via your datapad."  First we talked about a radius around the
bank--like say, in the courtyard outside. Then we started talking
bigger radii. Finally we we said, "You know, you could juse use the
bank from anywhere in the city!"

And we said, "Woow, that's awfully convenient! Saves tons of time! 
We could do that for pretty much every municipal structure!"

But there were some nagging concerns. And it helps to think about
the purpose of different types of structures.

In architectural theory (cf "Timeless Way of Building" or "A Pattern
Language") there's a lot of well-established thought about traffic
patterns and the ways in which they affect the well-being of a
community and the ways in which they affect the culture of a
community.

Let's take the example of community building. There's an oft-told
anecdote (the precise source of which escapes me atm) about a
company which was suffering from malaise because people weren't
coming up with good new ideas to advance the business, and there was
stagnation and loss of morale. When the office building the company
was located in was reorganized such that there was a central
courtyard type space that served as a crossroads, and the different
departments were obliged to walk through the courtyard on a regular
basis to do their regular work, morale boomed, so did ideas, and so
did profits. Why? Because the fact that people were interacting with
people (and therefore ideas) that they normally didn't sparked both
creativity and community.

The same logic can be applied to other types of desired results; if
you seek convenience, then it makes a lot of sense to *avoid*
crossroads. Roundabouts actually improve traffic flow precisely
because you don't have to encounter other people head on. The
reduced speed but lack of a total stop and waiting for turns to move
forward means that vehicles continue moving at a steady pace, and
there's actually a reduction in pedestrian accidents (good article
recently in Discover magazine about this effect).

A second key philosophical question--I asked the team, once we'd
argued these points for a couple of hours, what their preferred
metaphor was for a town in the game--player-run or not, really,
though we focused mostly on player-run.  Many different answers came
up--what sort of organization or community do you see that feature
of the game as being most like?

Ponder that one for a bit.

Got an answer?

OK, so one of the most frequent answers we got was "guild," meaning
people saw it as an alternate form of player association. We also
got "staging area" a lot, meaning people saw it as a launchpad to
the "real game." Some saw the metaphor as being "shopping mall" or
"apartment complex." My answer was kind of long and poetic, and
people kind of looked at me strangely as I rambled. It went
something like, "A 1950's small town with a local hardware store on
the corner where the shop owner knows what sort of paint you really
need for your fence and an ice cream parlor where you can go to get
root beer floats and sarsaparilla and a bar where everyone knows
your name and where the people you see at the local grocery store
are mostly people you know by sight if not by name and there's a
gazebo in the town square where sometimes they play live music..."

So we stopped for a moment and thought about what sorts of downtime
we were removing, and what sorts we were enforcing, and what types
of community building mechanics we were putting into the game. We
used examples from other games to think about the sorts of
activities and locations that we saw as drawing crowds and leading
to community ties.

Here's some examples from other games:

  * blacksmithies in Ultima Online.
  * banks in UO. 
  * town fountains in Diku muds.  
  * spawn points in EverQuest. 
  * safe zones in EQ.

Most of us on the team had fond memories of blacksmithies in UO. You
went there because you were looking for a player to repair your
weapons and armor, and you needed a skilled player to do it, or the
items might be ruined. They were there predictably because they
needed a forge to do it.  The result was a pleasant experience
chatting with the blacksmith, with others waiting their turn, and a
great launching pad for meeting folks and going on adventures.

On the other hand, most of us disliked the UO banks. They were the
default place where there was a crowd, but everyone who was there
was either there absorbed in an interface screen (i.e. not talking)
or was spamming the crowd with items for sale merely because there
were lots of people there.  It was not a sociable place, though it
was a social place. And of course, everyone stopped there at the
start and end of every adventure.

I have many fond memories of hanging out at town fountains in Diku
muds.  Usually they were set in a town square, and the structures to
the sides of the square were key to gameplay. The newbie hall, where
everyone first entered the game, opened down onto this square. The
inn, where everyone came to log out, and from which everyone logged
in, was on one side. The guildhall where you had to come to advance
a level was there. As a result, there was always a knot of people
swapping stories about where they had just been, and making plans
about where to go next. It's hard to imagine a more welcoming
environment for a newbie to step into.

Spawn points in EverQuest are of course a much maligned source of
downtime.  But many people attested to the idea that that was where
they chatted and talked.  But the fact that the downtime was a
barrier to further gameplay in their eyes (meaning, they were
camping so they could get some piece of armor or a weapon that they
saw as necessary to continued enjoyment of the game) led to
resentment of the enforced downtime and appears to have harmed its
value as a social space.

Whereas safe zones in EQ were seen as staging areas. These are
places of lower risk in the midst of dangerous areas. As natural
gathering places, these locations became places where you bumped
into people with common interests (killing whatever was nearby) and
of comparable skill (since they were likely to be in your level
range). It was where people retreated to to rest up and heal, and it
was where they started a big foray from. A base, so to speak.

With these examples in hand, we classified the types of social
spaces into three:

  STAGING: these are places where you form a group, find a friend,
  and decide what to do.

  PIT STOP: these are the obligatory stops you make before you get
  to have fun.

  RECOVERY: these are the places where you go after an adventure.

Here's a third touchstone question that emerged. Recovery
areas--what are they FOR? Think hard.

Got an answer? OK.

We were divided on this one too. Many of us saw them as obligatory
character maintenance--the place to go when you need to heal up. We
also saw them as rites of passage--the place to go to level up,
learn your skill now that you have the achievements, whatever. But
the third big thing we identified, and the thing that some of us
felt was the most important thing, was that they were opportunities
for mythologizing. The chance to retell the story of our adventures
to ourselves, the chance to establish a consensus history, relive
the incidents, and weave a narrative out of what were in fact very
disjointed moments with no storyline or structure to them.

As the fates would have it, we had a fantastic example of this at
lunch today.  We went out to Fuddrucker's for burgers, and after we
had eaten (think of that as the obligatory pitstop!), some of the
guys who had most strongly seen the recovery areas as being about
character maintenance started talking about the previous days' game
of Counterstrike. "...and then I whipped around the corner and the
machine gun..." "Yeah! And the idiot kept going and..." "Yeah, it
was great! And then he did the thing!"  "Yeah, the thing! That
rocked!"

They made no sense. :)

In light of this breakdown, it's easy to see that recovery areas are
GOOD sorts of downtime. That's why the safe areas in EQ and the town
fountains on Dikus work well. And it's also easy to see that
pitstops kind of suck; people see them as barriers to getting on
with the fun, like camping spawns or having to visit the bank before
and after every adventure.

An interesting case was the blacksmithy in UO. Clearly a pit
stop. But since it involved a player service, there was a human
element to it that was missing from the bank or the spawn
point. Waiting for another player is more palatable than waiting for
the server to do something for you. So pit stops don't have to all
be bad.

Lastly, staging areas seem plainly vital, because you need to have
places where you form your party or group.

But here's the rub. We had eliminated almost all of this stuff in
the name of convenience. You don't need to visit the bank in SWG if
you just enter town and transfer credits. To pick up gear you go by
your house, which means your group scatters to the four winds before
setting off. You don't visit the blacksmithy to get your weapon
repaired--you drop it in a hopper and pick it up later. You get a
mission on your datapad. You don't need to go to the town square to
get your mail, you do that on your datapad too.  In fact, the more
we talked about it, the more we posited that if there WERE key
structures (like needing to visit a shop to pick up your fixed
blaster) they'd be placed on the edge of cities, not in the center,
so that you could "bounce" off of town as quickly as possible.

Even our recovery areas suffer from this. Yes, we pretty much make
you go to cantinas and taverns, because you need to heal wounds. But
that means that the only people whom you will meet in cantinas are
wounded people and healers. And maybe a bartender. That leaves out a
lot of types of player--the politicians, the crafters, the farmers
and the animal trainers.

And that brings us to a fourth touchstone question. Do you think you
will play mostly with friends you make BEFORE the game, or friends
you make IN the game, or with strangers?

Empirically, we know that friends made in the game are retention
devices.  Frankly, we want you to play with people you meet IN the
game. That's because otherwise, all we have is a bunch of
cliques. Hermetic organizations made up of people who mostly knew
each other in advance somehow (maybe they organized their towns on a
web board, like so many of the SWG players are doing now). And no
easy way for a novice to the environment to make new friends. The
fact that the decisions we had made meant that people would not tend
to bump into strangers reveals a flaw in our thinking about managing
community and downtime.

Online games have the opportunity to offer microcommunities,
tight-knit groups of people working towards common causes. This is
something that most of us miss in our daily lives, and it's
something that is very woven into human nature and life, and has
been for millenia. We speak of the dehumanizing pace of life in the
cities, and the ways in which we tune out people in crowds. That's
why I can speak so nostalgically of the small town experience. A
large part of the attraction of online games is, to my mind,
recapturing that sense of community.  If we make life online overly
convenient, what we may end up doing is merely recreating the
experience of being a newbie in New York City.

But I could be wrong. And that's why I pose the question to you now
again, after you've read this very long rambling post.

How much time do you think you should spend socializing? And where? 
When does convenience become dehumanization? And fundamentally, just
how much downtime are you willing to take? Because it's evident that
some needs to be there.

I look forward to seeing the discussion. :)
<---end quote

-Raph
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