[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Sasha Hart" <Sasha.Hart at directory.reed.edu>
> [Dave Rickey]

>> They've succeeded because the classic Tank/Healer/Nuker group
>> dependancy triad is an extremely powerful engine for building
>> social links.

> This sounds interesting - would you mind spelling out how you
> think that engine works, e.g. what about the triad is important? 
> At points you make general reference to the XP/loot incentive for
> cooperation - is the T/H/N triad mainly just a manifestation of
> the loot incentive for grouping, or something else?

The loot incentive is the goal, and T/H/N does not neccessarily have
to be the means used by players to reach it.  However, players tend
to pursue the most efficient means of gaining reward, and because it
is always easier to coordinate the actions of one person than the
actions of three or more, there is a threshold of reward for
investment that grouping has to exceed before grouping becomes the
dominant form of play.

It may be that people are just naturally social creatures, and that
the main effect of T/H/N is indirect, it simply keeps the *same*
group of people together long enough to form the social ties.  It
strikes me that pure chat spaces would create random networks, not
the clustered "scale free" networks that characterize stable social
fabrics.

>> 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.

> Of course, as you may be suggesting, problems with class balance
> are only crucial to social connection insofar as everything is
> being pinned on the contingencies governing loot. So... provide
> reasons other than self-conscious "reward" (loot) to form social
> ties. Right?

I'm not sure if I agree with this statement or not.  I think I am
reluctant to accept the viability of durable and extensive social
fabrics that are not at some level tied to reward.  When you make
predictions of mass behaviour that are not grounded in individual
reward-seeking, you enter very shaky territory.  Sure, we'd like to
think the world isn't full of selfish bastards, but the cynics
always seem to carry the day in the end.

>> 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.

> Do people form social ties in real life just because there is
> nothing more immediate and visceral? Why is the game different?

Network theory discusses types of networks, from ordered to random.
Social networks fall into a category referred to as "scale free",
dominated by tightly connected clusters linked to each other by
"hubs".  Random networks have certain advantages, most tied into
failure resistance and speed of communication, ordered networks have
other advantages such as consistency of behaviour and the ability to
act in a coordinated fashion.  "Lumpy" scale free networks of
ordered clusters connected by random hubs seem to gain the best of
both worlds.

People form social ties because they evolved to want them, but that
only puts the question back one step, *why* was a desire for social
ties a survival mechanism?  Evolution is definitely a
reward-directed process.

> I think you will find that many of the differences could be (or
> have been!)  imported into games without too much
> difficulty. Neighborhoods, cities, special interest groups, clubs,
> conspiracies, ongoing reciprocal relationships, buddies from
> newbie school, jobs, bars, hierarchies...  Certainly I think you
> are right to finger the cost of forming connections, but I think
> the natural approach is to reduce the absolute cost rather than to
> increase the cost of anything that remotely competes. I think the
> goal is to facilitate friendships, not to suppress independence
> per se (the two are not mutually exclusive.)

Let's say that a player in a new environment will engage in
bond-building with 10 people a day, and the more days they build
bonds with the same people, the stronger those bonds get.  Further
assume there is a maximum amount of bonds they can maintain, say 50.
Acquaintances have a bond strength of 1, friends of 2, buddies of 3.
The environment has 1000 people in it, of which only 1 in 5 will be
in the world on any one day.  If by the end of the 5th day he hasn't
got at least 3 buddies, he'll log out and never come back.

If your player comes in, bonds with 10 random people, and logs out,
he's got 10 acquaintances.  If he logs in the next day and makes 10
more random social bonds, there is only a 1% chance that one of them
will be with one of the people he made an acquaintance with the day
before and become a friend.  There is a 18% chance that he will
reach the end of 5 days without having made 1 friend, and there is
only a 16% chance he will have made a buddy, the chances he'll have
3 are miniscule.

Obviously people don't act this way, they pursue deeper
relationships with people they already know in preference to more
casual acquaintances.  So, at the other extreme, if our player seeks
out any people he has met before making new acquaintances, he's
virtually certain to have around a dozen buddies at the end of 5
days.  However, people in these games don't neccessarily act *that*
way either.  How much he'll seek out others he's already met will be
a product of how hard they are to find, and how much he wants to
find them.

Communication features like /who, /tell, and friend lists act on one
side of that equation, trying to make it easier to contact people
you know.  T/H/N acts on the other side, increasing your incentive
to find them.  If communication features were so perfect that
contacting people you had already met required zero effort, would
that eliminate the need for an incentive?

However, although you would wind up with a thoroughly connected
society, it wouldn't be a good social network, because Jack may be
your buddy, and Jill may be your buddy, but J&J are essentially
random strangers to each other, there is no reason for your buddies
to be buddies with each other.  T/H/N addresses *that*, if you're a
tank, and Jack is a Healer, and Jill is a Nuker, and you ask these
two buddies to join you for a few rounds of whack-a-gnoll, now
*they* can become buddies.  Presto, Jack, Jill, and you are now the
seed crystal for a cluster.  If you don't log in the next day but
Jack and Jill do, Jack can ask his other tank friend John to fill
in.  Bam, now John is Jill's friend, and so it goes.

Somewhere along the line, you start hitting the limits on how many
connections people can sustain, and things stabilize into a closely
coupled cluster where most of the connections for each person in the
cluster are to other people in the cluster, and any open links are
usually filled from inside the cluster.  Sound like anything we see
in these games?

--Dave



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