[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Dave Rickey]

From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>
> From: Dave Rickey

>> 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.

> Humans are indeed naturally social creatures, in up to tribe-sized
> groups.

Not all of them, and not equally.

> Pure chat spaces create scale-free networks, not random ones. What
> determines the growth of a scale-free network is whether there are
> differences between nodes that make some nodes more "fit" than
> others. In the case of social networking, it's those people who
> are connectors, who have big Rolodexes. Not only do they tend to
> know more people, they also tend to acquire more friends.

Then why didn't Active Worlds do better?  It was a pure chat space
with an unlimited capacity to shape the world.  People could do
anything, talk to anyone, make anything, why wasn't that enough?
Maybe it was too much.

> Scale-free networks do have one notable weakness: if you take out
> the hub nodes, the entire network can collapse. This is clearly
> evidenced by all the anecdotes of guild leaders leaving and the
> entire guild collapsing.

True scale-free networks should never collapse from the removal of a
*single* hub, and even then they shouldn't shatter into their
component parts.  We're missing something.

--Dave



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