[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Freeman, Jeff
> Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 9:34 AM
> To: 'mud-dev at kanga.nu'
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

Yay, on this one I get to smack down someone who works for me. ;)
*poke Jeff*
 
<EdNote: I would like to announce that on a trial basis MUD-Dev now
offers mediation and arbitration services in addition to the usual
pound-their-stupid-head-into-the-ground-like-a-turnip range of
products and services.  It is expected that turnip planting will
remain the more economical option>

>> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]

>> 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.

> The disconnect I'm having here is that for socializers,
> socializing *is* playing.

Oh, yes, of course. But they are also not incurring any game
downtime in the process. To get more specific:

You can look at a game as being composed of activities tied to
reinforcement mechanisms. An action takes place, and the
game/opponent provides a reaction; the reaction had better be
broadly predictable, or else the player will consider it gambling,
not skill, and hence not a game in that sense.

In most games, the degree of activity tends to be bursty; in
physical games the bursts are the periods of actual physical
activity, followed by downtime for rest and recovery. In mental
games, the game is either designed to be relatively brief (usually
by overwhelming you) or the pace is player-directed.

In online games, you have a combination of all of these things. Take
the basic hack n slash advancement paradigm as an example, since
we're all pretty familiar with it (most of the list because they
make them, and those diehard holdouts who don't who keep hoping
we'll talk about non-GoP muds sometime, well, they've gotten amply
familiar with it by now, poor guys!).

In a level rat race design, you have a player-directed pace, and
ALSO an enforced activity schedule determined by the need for stats
to regenerate.  It's loosely enforced, since there's usually ways to
accelerate the process.  While within the encounter itself, it's
designed to be relatively brief; it too is also designed to
overwhelm you (or for you to overwhelm the opponent). A given combat
is not planned to last days like a chess match, but rather to be
self-terminating in a much shorter period of time.

So I am defining "downtime" as the periods when a player is on that
cycle and is not in the combat. More broadly, I'm defining downtime
as "time during a game session wherein a player is not actively
participating in game mechanics because said game mechanics are not
viable for that character at that time."

Socializers are excluded by this definition; they are not waiting
for something, so for them it isn't downtime. It's free time, which
is a different beast. They have intentionally stepped off the
treadmill and have all the time in the world. That's a radically
different mindset.

> Also, I tend to socialize while I am playing.  If I'm "just
> socializing and not playing or doing anything else", then I am
> probably AFK, and so not socializing.

Again, I suspect a semantic disconnect. "Socialize" and "playing"
are null terms in the above statement, because I am not sure what
you mean by them exactly.

>> 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.

> Absolutely disagree that downtime = socialization.  I tend to meet
> people and socialize while I am playing, and they are playing in
> the same area/doing the same thing.  During downtime I read a
> book.

Given that mechanically speaking, you're probably not typing while
you are hitting keys to get things to happen (such as striking
blows) I would guess that a lot then depends on the granularity of
your perception of downtime.  If you're walking from one close spawn
to another, then that's a form of downtime. A zero-downtime game
would be like an arcade shoot-em-up game (and even they pause when
you clear a wave). The fact that you are describing downtime as a
time when you read a book suggests a MUCH longer period of time.

>> friends. In fact, I'd go so far as to state that it is a Law of
>> Online World Design: Socialization Requires Downtime.

> Argh.  Resist the tempation.  It's not right!

Well, I haven't heard a good argument against it yet. :)

In a GoP environment, players who are engaging in the activity are
going to want to devote their full mental faculties to the activity
itself (in fact, that's how they get those endorphin highs, entering
quasi-meditative states while engaging in the activity). They're not
going to chat during that time; if they don, they won't be all that
successful at the activity unless they are expert enough players
that they can time-slice the activity so tightly that the space
between one blow and another is perceived as downtime by them. (And
this is pretty common, and a lot depends on the pace and nature of
the activity).

Now, if we posit that meaningful social interaction requires at
least a question or statement and a reply (an in most cases, will
require more than that; a mere two-sentence interaction that
actually reveals something about the other's personality either
presupposes prior knowledge between the two, or is a dead-end) then
we see that in order for there to be enough room for social
interaction, the activity must have a fairly slow pace of input (and
situation assessment) and both players must have some comparable
level of timeslicing that so that their respective slower-paced
moments coincide.

In my head I am seeing this as a graph; places where the two troughs
coincide are where players might talk. The trough has to be long
enough that the player's attention can be easily divided from what
they percieve as the principal activity.

>> Let's take a bank as an example.

> Yeah, we used that as an example of a social space in UO - people
> socialize at the bank in UO.  But *that isn't downtime*.  Neither
> is getting your armor repaired at the blacksmith shop.

And actually, using the above definitions (which are brand new, I
just came up with them as a typed, I am thinking out loud here) we
can see why the bank sucks. Despite the fact that player congregate
at the bank, the bank is actually a peak on the graph, not a
trough. It's a moment when players' attention is heavily taken up by
a game mechanic necessary to their goal.  They cannot effectively
timeslice the activity of dropping stuff in the bank and taking
stuff out, and many of the decisions they make are in fact fairly
high-pressure decisions that can affect the success of their
characters in the future. They are self-directed in time impact,
sure, but players are not likely to want to be distracted while
making them.

The sole exception I can think of--if they are there with someone
who is already trusted, in which case they may socialize a little,
and ask for advice on the decisions. But this is not a case likely
to get strangers to talk to one another meaningfully. Unless they
have crossed some threshold of trust on the player's part, their
advice isn't useful.

The blacksmithy example involves very few decisions. It's a required
gameplay activity, but the decision is "go there" which is a
high-priority decision but comes BEFORE the standing around while
there, and a low-oriority decision "leave early" case which burbles
along in the back of the mind but doesn't have much tug to it. (I'm
coming up with a different metaphor in the back of my mind now,
which is a weighted AI decision; the "keep getting cheese" impulse
has a far lower priority than the "fix my paw" impulse; it therefore
gets pushed to the bottom of the stack until "fix my paw" is
completed. Since the "fix my paw" has an enforced delay on it,
impulses which are normally MUCH lower than "keep getting cheese"
have an opportunity to appear, such as the "sniff other mice's
butts" impulse. Hi there, Mr, Maslow, how are you today?).

>> 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 lesson to learn from this is that the people were required to
> come into contact with one another due to the new building layout.
> They were NOT required to stand around in the foyer for hours a
> day doing nothing.

I see these as two facets of the same problem.

For the layout described to work to that purpose, it's evident that
SOME of the tasks the people had must have been lower priority than
"sniff other mice's butt" or else there would have been zero
interaction even in the courtyard area. Or perhaps some of the tasks
were higher priority but had that sort of enforced downtime (I can
easily see this layout working if every Xerox machine in the entire
company were located in the counrtyard, for example).

If not, what you get is just a traffic nightmare as everyone rushes
through the courtyard as quickly as possible.

((HUGE side note: it occurs to me that if you know the Bartle
breakdown of your playerbase by broad percentages, and you can write
some basic ALife code for weighted goals and then weight
additionally for each entity based on their Bartle's type, you could
probably throw this at your game's dataset and get a nice overhead
view of your game with dots running around that shows you exactly
what zones won't get used and why.))

> *Jumping up and down screaming noooooooo!!!!!!! as you ponder
> adding that "law"*

> People need the opportunity to come into contact with other
> people.  Crossroads are good.  Forced downtime is baaaaaad.

Opportunity is not enough; there must be coincident troughs in the
graph. I rest my case. ;)

-Raph
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