[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Derek Licciardi]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marian Griffith
> Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2001 2:26 PM
> To: Mud Dev Mailing list
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

> Downtime is psychologically necessary for players. If the
> experience is sufficiently intense players need time to reorient
> themselves. I clear- ly remember the first time I went to visit
> dangerous monsters on muds I have played. Some of those required a
> well-organised (!)  group of 30 or so players to defeat
> them. After the nerve-wracking experience of step- ping through
> the portal to the most fearsome monster in the game I was mentally
> spent. Even if I did not survive the fight and the Imms had to
> step in to retrieve the corpses.  Those were big events, planned
> for a week, and after that nobody was fit to play.  All we could
> do was hang out and lick our wounds, talking about what happened
> and what had gone wrong, or sometimes, right.  While I am aware
> that most of the time the game experience is not quite so
> stressfull, it still sets (should set) the adrenaline flowing, and
> a player needs to recover from that.  Downtime helps with that,
> and it is a good idea if the setting where that happens encourages
> socialisation as much as the gameplay does.  Enforcing
> socialisation in a game that encourages solo play makes no sense,
> and will fail. Players will perceive it as annoying, find a safe
> spot and set their afk flag.  In games that encourage groups it
> makes a lot sense to make sure that there are natural spots for
> the players to spend their downtime. It is where new players will
> gravitate towards to and find others to group with, or have a
> chance to overhear more expe- rienced players, and ask for help or
> advise.  

There is something else that needs to be taken from this.  I am
thinking of this as I go so bear with me.  Downtime and
socialization correlate with one another, but what is downtime if
the uptime did not provide something to discuss during downtime.  It
is hard to ask strangers to talk to eachother, if they can not find
a common ground to start the conversation from.  Small-talk believe
it or not actually serves a purpose.  In most games, your avatars
look so dreadfully similar that it is hard for a stranger to pick a
discussion with you.  An anecdote to support what I am saying:

While playing an Iksar Necro in EQ, I happened across a friend of
mine in RL that gave me a gossimer(sp?) robe.  I made the effort to
go to the mainland at level 8 and get it.  It turned out that it was
one of the better things I could have done for socializing in game.
I was fairly unique in Kunark and I was recognizable at a glance.  I
can't tell you how many people struck up conversation with me
because I was wearing something that they wanted to know about.  We
found a common ground and discussion easily flowed from there most
of the time.

Thinking from Marian's point of view, we can see that socializing
after the battle was about what had just occured.  No doubt that the
stories from that adventure would live on in the guilds/cities and
in the memories of the participants, but the stories would be passed
on to friends and generations of newcomers.  Generations of social
contact probably occured as new people were introduced to the
experienced people by re-telling the story of that night.  In this
regard, the effective use of downtime for socialization could be
related to the in-game experience that the group just went through
or has gone through before.  Without any excitement in the game,
there is no real topic to discuss during downtime without resorting
to local sports scores, out-of-game jokes and other meta-game
topics.

Either type of communication is good for socializing as long as
you're not a role-playing nazi.  It seems to me that providing
something to talk about in game beyond game-mechanics could be a way
to increase socializing dramatically.

Derek

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