[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Brian 'Psychochild' Green" <brian at psychochild.org>
> 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.

I was actually thinking of urban neighborhoods rather than small
towns.  I'm not sure absolute size really has as much to do with it
on that level, so much as there is nothing in my neighborhood to
make us want to interact, or even have much opportunity.  Why would
I want to interact with my neighbors, and when would I do it?

> 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.

An alternative theory is that as increased mobility and
communication made it easier to form relationships with people other
than those most physically proximate to you, the density of
neighborhood links inevitably declined.

> 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.

Exactly, but then the question becomes how do you encourage people
to have repeated mutual experiences rather than randomly bouncing
off of each other?  Maybe advancement-based systems aren't all bad,
after all they do reduce the pool of people you will interact with
to those closer to your level, and thereby increase your
interactions with any particular individual?

>> 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.

MCO was a great concept that could have done much better...as a
boxed title with free internet play and an integrated
matchmaker/chat client.  As an MMOG on a pay-for-play model, it was
doomed.

> 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.

Maybe not, but it works.  I'm not arguing that it is the *only* way,
only that it does in fact work, although it emerged almost by
accident and we only now are getting the conceptual framework to
understand why.  I'm pretty certain that dependancy relationships
are in fact essential to creating durable communities, but I
strongly doubt that T/H/N is the only viable set of relationships.

>> 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.

In my response to Jeff Freeman, I detailed why the networks that
result from casual banter versus those of mixed-capability groups
differ, essentially one creates a randomly linked network and the
other creates clusters.

At the core of the game, I think you need a dependancy relationship
that pushes the players to form these clusters.  Without it, you
won't have a community.  You point out that M59 doesn't have such
dependancies, is it possible that is why EQ (which in other gameplay
aspects is very similar) had explosive growth and M59 did not
(because dependancy does not arise outside of PvP, which represents
a higher threshold)?

> 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.

I see no evidence to indicate truly global channels are inherently
desirable.  At some level, community formation is not just finding
people you get along with, but excluding those with whom you do not.

>> 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.

After how long?  In DAoC, the incentive to group arrives around
level 10, which is about the same time most new players have
mastered the basic gameplay and are able to concern themselves with
such things.  In UO during the Dread Lord era, it arrived (in the
form of PK) the minute you logged in.  Too late may be as bad as too
early.

>> 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.

I'm not ignoring them, or trying to argue that T/H/N is the only
means of socializing the players.  It could quite easily be the
worst method...except for the others that have been tried.  If we
can get a better understanding of why it works, maybe we can find or
adapt others to serve the same function.  But "natural" social
networks form linked clusters for good reasons, many of which apply
as much to MMOG communities as to "real" ones.

Anyway, trust networks are all about dependancy relationships.  We
only trust others because we must.

--Dave



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