[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[rayzam]

From: "Sellers, Mike" <msellers at origin.ea.com>
> Michael Tresca wrote:
>> Dave Rickey wrote:

>>> ...  Social communities form as a response to the challenges the
>>> developers code into the system, and the goals that players find
>>> to pursue within the system.  They cannot be formed in a vacuum
>>> with neat slots and heirarchies.

>> Social communities will form because there's lots of people
>> sitting around in a group.  We'd love to think that they form
>> because WE want them to (due to the challenges).  They might,
>> sometimes.  But a much more powerful force is the social hub
>> interaction, the element that is so often left outside of games.
>> They don't have to have a goal.  They don't have to have
>> anything.

> In practice that's rarely the case.  Early graphical chatrooms
> (e.g., Worlds Chat) did not form viable communities.  There was
> nothing to do, no challenge, and no social referents (that is, no
> external functional objects -- such as a ball -- that two people
> could refer to jointly in a social context).

> A challenge acts as a catalyst for community formation.  The
> "circle the wagons" effect is real and powerful: if you give a
> disparate group of people a common and external crisis or
> challenge, they will almost inevitably form the beginnings of a
> community.  Whether that community survives long beyond the crisis
> depends on whether they are able to form secondary bonds not
> related to the crisis.  >

A challenge isn't necessary. What is necessary is what was stated 2
paragraphs above, social referents, or some way to delineate a
social hierarchy. As Einstein said: it's relative.  If you take a
group of people out of a larger group, isolating them from the rest,
the group tends to break up into groups similar to the original.

Take the valedictorians from a variety of high schools, and put them
in the same college, and that class of freshmen will break up into
different social groups, just like they had in high school, and like
is shown in The Breakfast Club. There's a similar effect in prison
populations.

Communities are fractal. What is necessary is looking at any
specific scale, and seeing the relative differences between
compatriots. People will segregate themselves based on differences
with others [and sometimes this is more powerful than similarities
with others].

    rayzam
    www.travellingbard.com

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