[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001 22:33:27 -0400 
Derek Licciardi <kressilac at home.com> wrote:

> 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.

Communication is driven by interest.  Something is interesting and
people are interested in it.  This is trite until you examine the
mechanics of the states of "interested" and "interesting" and how
that affects the handling of attention as a commodity.  It gets
easier if you view attention as a mechanical substance which can be
treated and manipulated as a resource in its own right.

You had a gossamer robe.  It was interesting.  It invited and even
sought attention by simple existence.  It attracted interest so
people became "interested" (in it).  Interest is carried by
attention.  You put attention on something and are interested and so
put more attention on that thing.  Without the initial attention the
cycle never starts.  Attention, at a base level, is in itself a form
of communication (the sense of being watched).  Moving from that
base level of communication to verbalisation is a narrow and usually
easy transition (its secondary factors which break this, not
primary), already smoothed by the fact that both ends of the
communication have a known common item (the gossamer robe) which
they are interested in (both parties start from a known point of
agreement).

That point of common agreement, even if its implicit, is critical.

  You see a guy down the block with a new Ferrari 355.  You walk
  over and say, "Cool car!  That's, damn, that's just amazing!  Can
  I have a look?" and the guy replies, "Oh that piece of junk?  Its
  crap really.  Toasted.  I'm getting rid of it.  Ferrari's are such
  pieces of crap.  I wish they'd never given it to me.  Worthless.
  The salvage guy will be along later to tow it to the wreckers."

  There went that conversation.  You thought you had a point of
  common shared agreement and the first thing that happened was that
  the other guy told you you didn't, and that any common
  understanding you had thought you had, you didn't.

  Now if the guy had replied instead, "Yeah, nice isn't it.  I just
  got it a couple months ago and love it.  Want to come for a ride?"
  you'd have the early building blocks of a conversation -- mutual
  interest in a common item, mutual agreement/understanding on that
  interest (you both know that you both think its a wow! car).

We can use and build on that structure as game designers.

A common technique in teaching character development presentation
for actors is to have them do the scene while doing something else.
While washing dishes.  While getting dressed.  While building a
model yacht.  While cutting their toenails.  While batheing.  The
use of the excess activity is manipulating exactly this point in
controlling and channeling the flow of attention.

> Thinking from Marian's point of view, we can see that socializing
> after the battle was about what had just occured.  

Have you noticed how much more enjoyable it is to relate that battle
to someone else who was also in it than to an outsider?  Or when you
are relating it to an outsider how it becomes most enjoyable at that
instant where the other chap actually understands and can actually
fully visualise the event as you saw it -- the point at which he
finally agrees with you and you share an understanding.  And of
course, how quickly that can tarnish if they then turn around and
reveal that they really didn't understand after all.

The battle is interesting.  It commanded attention and that defined
interest.  You continue to have attention on it.  That fact of the
attention begs communication (if you have small kids you're all to
familiar with this process).  You talk to Bubba about it.  Bubba
becomes interested in it as you have put his attention on it.  He
puts more attention on it -- perhaps he asks you questions and gets
you to amplify.  Bubba groks the battle, and agrees, yes, that thing
that happened to Boffo was just hilarious.  You now have a common
agreement that the battle is interesting, and therefore have
achieved understanding ("He understands...").  

  Instant society: just add communication.

At the end of the day you have a group who have a common shared
experience (they were in the battle) and a more diffuse group who
understand the battle.  That common basis breeds common
understanding.  You all "know".

Watch 'nam vets talking.  (I used to live around a bunch of them)
They weren't in the same battles.  They have few directly shared
experiences but they all "understand".  They all have a base common
agreement on 'Nam and what it was like even if the details don't
match.  That simple knowledge of a shared understanding is enough to
build everything else on.

  "Oh!  You're am XXXX player!  Gosh, have you seen the YYY down at
  ZZZ?  Didja know that you can QQQ?

The agreement is the keystone.

> 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.

As happens my father is a WWII veteran.  As also happens he rarely
ever talked about those experiences (perhaps less than a dozen times
in the last 30+ years with nothing in the last 15).  I can count the
stories he told of that time on the fingers on one hand.  I don't
think he ever repeated any more than twice.  A couple I only heard a
second time via my siblings re-relating the tale.  I know every one
of those stories cold along with their details and import, and yes,
I've passed them on and told them to others.  Heck, at a couple of
the MUD-Dev dinners I've told his tories.

Stories have a life of their own.  Witness Kipling.

MUD worlds are even more closed communities.  The level of shared
reality is even less well spread.  The population of those who are
capable of "understanding" is small.  There's almost a level of
desperation at the rate and vehemence with which stories spread
within game populations.

A story is not real until you've told it to someone else.

A game event is not really real until at least a dozen people have
told it to each other.  Twice.

Self-referential positive feedback loops.

  So why is it that our game clients don't enable implicit logging?

  Why can't we sit playing EQ/UO/MudFoo and at any point, without
  afore thought or planning, roll back the game and re-view it
  exactly as it happened?  Why can't we take those recordings and
  distribute them for others to see and share?

  Oh, we can, but we have to do special things first.  Ahh.

  We're dealing with the basic grist of human communication here, of
  shared experience, and we don't even help them do a, "look at what
  I saw!"

<<Yes I know about text MUD client logging in ZMud et al.  cf the
Black Rose papers>>

> 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.  

Given that an in-game event is not really real until a dozen people
have told it to each other, down time is when that occurs.  You
can't tell each other about things to make them real when your
attention is n the middle of being fixated by the next battle.  

Decompression time.  R&R.  That's really what we're talking about in
downtime.

> 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.

Excitement is the case of something successfully being excessively
interesting so as to forcefully compel attention and thereby demand
interest.

> 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.

Its certainly going to happen anyway.  I don't see much sense in
playing King Canute.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows
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