[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Timothy O'Neill Dang
> Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 12:33 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience
> Raph Koster sez:
 
>> 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.

> This reminds me of the arguments I've made for not making
> super-efficient game economies.

cf Mahrin's point about removing vendors. The thing is that vendors
were invented as a way of improving player-player economic
interaction by providing a proxy for players to serve as economic
participants even when logged off.

One of the notions that I have been playing with is the notion of
whether or not someone is participating in a meaningful way in the
player-player economy. In those anthropology tables that describe
how complex societies get at different sizes, the key element seems
to be that the memebers of the society are all THERE
(obviously). But on a mud, they're not. The person who is logged off
may well have near zero impact on the economy while not present,
given the huge lack of subsistence-level needs. Thus, even if you
have tens of thousands of people present in an economy, the social
development of the group may well be retarded by the fact that
absent people may as well not exist. Vendors help to rectify that.

Further steps would really need to be taken for it to really work
though.  There would need to be much more of the character's
presence in the game in an economically meaningful way even while he
is logged off. We're trying some of this with SWG with many economic
activities (extraction of resources, refining of resources into
goods, sale of resources, and expenditure of resources for ongoing
costs) being done even if the character is logged off, via droids
and installations.

The tradeoff, obviously, is that there isn't anyone manning the
shop, so there's nobody to talk to. So it's a possible solution to
tighter economic ties, but it doesn't speak to interaction. We have
had players on the discussion board arguing that it does, but I
don't know that picking up a load of ore from a mine and dropping it
off as another player's blaster factory drives any *social*
interaction any more than my ordering a book from Amazon means that
I get to know the clerk.

> My question about this is, is goal-oriented interaction or idle
> interacti on a better experience, or better for society-building? 
> There certainly need s to be time to talk, because very little can
> be communicated via short tac tical commands during combat. But,
> is pure, undirected "downtime" most promisin g for interaction? 
> This is probably different for different kinds of people , but I
> often find that I socialize best when there is a context for the
> so cialization.  This is more true with folks I don't already know
> well.

My sense is that shared experiences are key. It doesn't help to have
goal-directed interactions if everyone is having different
interactions with the interface.

I also don't think that pure directionless downtime is that useful
for anyone but socializers. My suspicion is that people will tend to
fall back on their cliques rather than interact with new people.

-Raph
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