[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

*crawls out of his cave*

Dave Rickey wrote:

> 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.

Actually, how well you connect to the social fabric tends to be a
function of size, in my experience.  People in smaller towns still
do know everyone in town and new people tend to be absorbed into the
social fabric easier.  In larger towns, you tend to get a lot more
of the impersonal feeling you describe.

One reason is due to the frequency of contact with other people.  In
a smaller town, you are much more likely to run into your neighbors
on your way to work (or even at work), at a restaurant, or at the
local watering hole.  In a large city, you could potentially never
run into your neighbors while you are out and about in town.  I've
heard many stories about people talking about the same effect in
online RPGs; they meet a friendly face once then never see that
person again.

So, I think you can define it more in terms of of shared
experiences. If you work with your neighbors, eat with your
neighbors, and go out drinking with your neighbors, you are more
likely to get to know them since you share common events in your
life.  People who share repeated experiences in a game are more
likely to form social bonds that those that brush against each other
a few times.
 
> 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).

I wholeheartedly disagree.  I believe stronger bonds come from
competition.  In Meridian 59, player guilds have incredibly strong
bonds between themselves, especially during times when they are
fighting against other players.  People in guilds form lifelong
friendships (and rivalries) that have lasted years after they left
the game.  I can say this because the cooperative gameplay elements
that do not result from competing with other players is almost
non-existent in Meridian 59.

However, I will agree that the bonds formed by cooperative fighting
will form more readily since it is easier to set up a manageable
system for cooperative fighting in a game.

I think it's also worth noting that Meridian 59 has extensive means
of communication within the game.  This includes a global chat
channel, bulletin boards (newsglobes), and player-to-player in-game
mail.  These channels of communication allow people to stay in touch
with people they have formed initial bonds with.  This allows them
to create their own shared experiences (communicating with each
other), instead of relying on out-of-game methods to do so.

> I believe the reason why Motor City Online has been so marginal is
> because it has no group objectives at all, only individual goals.

Really, MCO should have done better.  I'm not a huge fan,
personally, but one of my good friends is a huge fanatic of the
series.  The previous Motor City games practically screamed to be
put online for people to compete against each other.  MCO seemed to
be a natural extension of the direction the game was already going.
The game was obviously going to appeal to the fans of "classic"
cars, which means that the players in the game already have a shared
experience to start them off.

Personally, I think MCO has failed because they do not provide
enough means of communication for players in order to build a
community.  The first thing the game should have done to returning
players logging onto the game is put them into a chat with other
idle players.  Listening to someone talk about the Chevy they just
got in the game or hearing someone else talk about the honey of a
Mustang they're working on during the weekends offline would have
revved up any car enthusiast.  Letting a Chevy enthusiast and a Ford
enthusiast "discuss" the relative merits of their favored company
would have helped form a dynamic and interesting community.  Instead
the game feels very sterile and lonely, and there's no way for
people to easily interact.  In the end, my roommate just saw other
people as obstacles to his enjoyment of the game in MCO; other
players became "that asshole that decides to drive backwards on the
track just to mess other people up."

People don't continue to play our games so that they can fill one of
the "tank, healer, nuker" roles and have to rely on people to fill
in the other 2 roles.  People stick around in our games for
community.  If you don't provide a means for people to form the
community, then the community obviously won't form.  Sure you can
form a community by forcing people into certain roles that rely on
each other, but this is not the only way.

> 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".

Honestly, can you say this is different than what most current games
offer?  If you don't come into the game with a group of friends,
then you form friends by waiting for a group in a populated spawn
point so that you can engage in "the casual bantering of people who
happen to be doing the same thing in the same 'place'."  From this
casual bantering you form a regular group of people that you hunt
and chat with, and usually you eventually get introduced to the
larger social group, the player guild.

Guild connections tend to be the strongest in larger games because
of frequency of interaction.  In a game without a true global chat
channel, particularly one with such limited global channels like
DAoC, a global guild channel allows you to interact with a wide
selection of people, to find other people you can get along with,
and form the bonds into the social fabric that are necessary for the
player to stick around after the gameplay has gone stale.
 
> 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.

There are ways to encourage people to work together beyond your
"triad" of fantasy roles.  Again, Meridian 59 has no specific focus
on these roles; healers are ignored due to the pacing in combat,
just like in DAoC RvR, and nukers were pretty weak for most of the
game's commercial history.  However, the simple fact that numbers
provide a significant advantage in a combat situation where you
can't easily exploit a stupid AI system provides all the incentive
you need for people to form bonds in the game.

> 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").

While I don't discredit network theory as a means to explain the
social connections in the game, I do think you are ignoring other
methods for players to be introduced and to work into the social
network.  How people get involved in the network is probably more
interesting than the network they form from a game developer's point
of view.  Once people are initiated and ingrained into the social
network of the game, they will often find it very hard to leave that
network with it's familiar, comfortable connections.

So, where can we go from here?  People have brought up the issue of
"trust networks" as a useful socialization tool in our games.  In
what other ways could you use the social network in a game for the
benefit of the game as a whole?  Interesting questions to ponder.

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
       Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
      |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_               Meridian 59
     |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-' http://meridian59.neardeathstudios.com/
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)    Welcome back to your favorite online game.

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