[MUD-Dev] Social Networks

[Dave Rickey]

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

>> Not all of them, and not equally.

> Of course not. You said "humans" not "individuals." :)

But the social network is a collection of individuals, you cannot
separate questions of network behavior from the link-creation
behaviour of the nodes.

>>> 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.

> That's why I said that network theory helps a lot with the "what"
> but not the "why." That's where the anthropology reading comes in
> handy. Jared Diamond postulates caloric extraction from the soil
> requiring cooperation.  McElvaine attributes it in small groups to
> self-defense and tribal identity, and in larger groups to the
> transition to something similar to Diamond's caloric hypothesis,
> the invention of agriculture. In a generalized sense though, it
> seems to be "shared objectives or struggle."

I've been thinking of it in terms of "defining social conflict".
There is something that individuals want that they can only achieve
through cooperation of a larger scale.  In EQ, it was managing the
spawns of high-level encounters, in Camelot it is control of relics
and access to Darkness Falls.  The problem in both cases seems to be
that they have nothing *else* to do that requires that level of
organization, and a limited scope of activity that contributes to
that goal.

>>> 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.

> My surmises: one, that the guilds rarely reach a size where they
> are truly scale-free; usually they are star networks or weakly
> formed scale-free networks. Two, that usually something traumatic
> enough to cause the one leader to depart is often enough to cause
> multiple leaders to depart, ths meeting the criteria for
> scale-free network collapse (multiple hubs going away in a short
> span of time).

I've been trying to think of ways to establish multiple hubs.  One
thing we did with our Guild support in-game was allow an indefinite
number of "Rank Zero" guildmaster characters, and an almost
unlimited ability for Guild-releated powers to be delegated to lower
ranks (what can't be delegated is the power to edit the permissions
structure, only rank zero can do that).  Since launch, we've also
put in a system for auto-promoting *someone* to rank zero in the
event that the GM just vanishes, so that the guild structure can
survive abandonment by its founder.  I think the way that managing
authority has been concentrated into the titular GM has forced the
existence of a singular hub in other games.  However, when we did
all that it was by "feel", I hadn't thought of it as a network.  We
were just trying not to impose a particular form onto guilds, but
instead create a framework in which various schemes could be managed
by the players.

> Of course, guild migration between games also speaks to this.

What I find myself wondering is, if we can create explicit support
(or even encouragement) of multiple hubs and more cross-cluster
random links, will that make guilds less likely to migrate?

--Dave



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