[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Dave Rickey]

I was discussing a MMOG design idea with someone offlist, and
realized that I was going through yet another variant of the "The
game is the community" loop, but this time with some variation.
What we started with was the idea (often discussed on this list)
that fantasy-themed OLRPG's are limiting their market, because
swords and dragon and magic are too "out there" for most people.

That's a common perception, and mostly accurate from a marketing
perspective, but not directly relevant.  Certainly there's some
causality there, UO, EQ, and Camelot all got their initial seed
populations from the hardcore fantasy fans. But that's not why they
have succeeded.  They've succeeded because the classic
Tank/Healer/Nuker group dependancy triad is an extremely powerful
engine for building social links.

These games are communities.  That's been said, but never really
explained, mostly because even many of those who say it are simply
stating an observation.  They don't know *why* these games are
communities, and something with broader appeal like online card
games is not.  But it all goes back to that Tank/Healer/Nuker triad.

There's been a lot of research into the workings of networks
(networks as a theoretical entity, not just electronic networks) in
the last few years (and will likely be a few Nobel prizes handed out
for some breakthroughs in that time).  Much of this has been an
analysis of social networks.  One of the things that has been
discovered is that social networks, left to themselves, tend to be
lumpy.  Social bonds can have various properties, and it is
difficult to describe exactly what constitutes a "strong" link, but
an overwhelming characteristic is that generally the strong bonds
come in clusters, the people you have strong bonds with tend to have
strong bonds to each other.  For example, you probably have strong
bonds with your parents, who have a strong bond with each other
(even if divorced, social bonds indicate intensity of a relationship
and no matter how your parents feel about each other it is unlikely
they are indifferent), and with your siblings.

Another property of networks is how much connectivity they have,
basicly defined by how many links the average node has.  An example
of low vs. high connectivity would be to contrast old-style
neighborhoods with modern suburbia.  In the old neighborhoods,
everyone knew everyone else around, by face and name, and knew their
history and that of their family members.  Virtually every member
had a direct social link to everyone else in the neighborhood.  This
makes a dense social network.  At the other extreme, I live in a
townhouse development full of dual-income, no-kids households.  I
have only met the people living in the townhouse next door (with
whom I share an interior wall) once, and I don't know their names.
In the terminology of networks, I am a weakly connected leaf node,
and my neighborhood is a sparse social network.  I have no sense of
"belonging" to that neighborhood, it is just one of many places I
have lived in my life, and one I could leave at any time without a
sense of loss.

In the context of MMOG's, the strongest connections we can foster
through direct game design are those built by cooperatively fighting
together in pursuit of individual rewards (XP and loot, RP and
glory).  Even though the fighting is virtual, humans are hard-wired
at a basic level to feel closely tied to those they have cooperated
with in combat.  Then, because good XP gain requires having members
of the right classes operating off the same plan, guilds are formed
so people can always find a "good" group (along with a lot of
complaining about how the game "forces" them to group).  The virtual
intimacy of combat is then reinforced by the real social bonds of
friendship as people spend their "downtime" chatting about their
lives, both real and virtual.  From that point on, people aren't
paying to play the game, they're paying to hang out with their
friends, the game is just something they do together.

I believe the reason why Motor City Online has been so marginal is
because it has no group objectives at all, only individual goals.
WW2O, on the other hand, has the problem that its only meaningful
goals are *too* group-centric, there is no small-scale
organizational dynamic that is directly rewarded.  If WW2O had some
kind of graduated progression from individual combat to squad-level,
the army-level combat that is the centerpiece of the of the game
would be much more approachable (because battalions and regiments
would be much easier to assemble, and people would already be
integrated into the social mileau).

The problem with the concepts thrown around for many potential
MMOG's are not that the game appeals to people outside the geek
fraternity, but because they offer no obvious hooks on which to hang
a small-scale group experience, few social ties are generated and
most of those tend to be of the weakest sort, the casual bantering
of people who happen to be doing the same thing in the same "place".

Now, that is not neccessarily an insurmountable barrier, certainly
one could build a socializing core into many different games.  But
without building it around such a core and keeping it constantly in
mind, you might have difficulty preventing some equivalent of the
"Tankmage" problem where your social engine is stalled out by people
who find the combination of gameplay elements that make them
independant from your social ties.  Once it is found, it will be
widely used by players, because dependancy on others is seen at a
gut level as a weakness.  The downside of weakness is immediate and
visceral, the upside of social ties is delayed and cerebral, and
people in these games overwhelmingly pursue the short-term payoff.
The result is a crowd of individuals with no social ties, who
eventually reach the limit of your gameplay and leave.  What's
worse, they will reach the limits of that limited subset of your
gameplay that can be pursued with the "solo" templates, which will
happen much sooner that they could exhaust the entirety.  There has
been literally thousands of man-years of work put into perfecting
the Tank/Nuker/Healer triad in a fantasy setting, millions if you
count the player time spent breaking it in various games.

What struck me as I was writing this the first time was how much
more applicable network theory had been to this problem than any
other approach I had seen.  A previously intractable problem,
explaining why some games developed robust communities and some
didn't, becomes painfully obvious when analyzed as a problem in
network theory (the magic word is "criticality").  I know Raph must
have been looking into this field, from some remarks he made a few
months back, but I'm wondering if anyone else has tried examining
these games in terms of their network properties?

--Dave



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev