[MUD-Dev] Casual player socialization (was: Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server)

[John Buehler]

Marc Fielding writes:
> [Ron Gabbard]

>> I think most people agree that building friendships and socials
>> bonds may be the critical element to building up an "exit
>> barrier" for a player, i.e., a player with in-game friends is
>> less likely to quit the game.

>> This monk could theoretically grow to level 40 without making a
>> single "bonded" friend as every person with which they have
>> grouped has been an alt to whom the player has low emotional ties
>> (compared to their primary character).

> For the casual player, in-game "friend lists" have a great deal of
> turnover. Keeping up with hardcore friends and scheduling
> playdates with casual ones is an exercise in frustration. Thus the
> "friendship as exit barrier" concept mentioned above only really
> applies to non-casual players.

Random comment time, I guess.

Casual players are those that spend a modest amount of time playing
a game.  Typically, games don't leave characters available for
interaction while the players are inactive.  I've been wondering
whether socialization would be improved for casual players if they
were able to do the equivalent of email through characters.

That is, if you are playing Bob and I am playing Andy and there is a
reason for Bob and Andy to interact in the virtual world, but our
playtimes don't overlap (or frequently don't overlap), then can we
still send messages to each other and slowly develop a pen-pal style
of interaction based on game activities?

This would require that our characters stay in the world while we
are not playing them.  Such a game probably wouldn't have
competitive activities as its mainstay entertainment, but I think it
could be done.  Certainly that single topic (offline characters) is
a heavily-debated one.

But I'm assuming that if Andy says something to Bob, then you should
receive that message as a kind of 'offline message' - to take from
Yahoo IM's terminology (and perhaps chat systems in general).

Given such an implementation, casual players are able to socialize,
but at a far slower pace.

If Bob is a crafter and Andy needs some item, that request can be
made, even when you aren't controlling Bob.  When you come back
online, the request for the item will appear and you can decide
whether to make the item.  If you make it, it's certainly within the
realm of reason to permit Bob to turn that item over to Andy for a
sum of money without you actively controlling Bob.

If I were to bluesky this whole thing a bit more, NPC AI could be
used to make characters which are not being controlled by their
players do something at least in-context to the game world other
than to just stand around like statues.  And, in turn, whatever
features the players want for their characers could be used for the
rest of the NPCs that the gamemasters 'control'.  Characters as a
whole become more feature rich.

But I'm digressing as usual.  The base notion is to keep all
characters in the game world all the time and to let what is said to
a character of an absentee player reach that player when they return
to the game software (or possibly just receive regular emails).  The
goal is to enhance the sense of community for casual players.

JB


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