MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?)

[Derek Licciardi]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Mark Mensch" <mark at larping.net> wrote:

>> I look at the impacts upon a community and society - including
>> that within virtual space.

> I do too, and once you reach a critical mass of people, the
> communities break down into smaller separate communities. Society
> has a self defense mechanism that way. I've lived in a moderately
> sized city in Florida, a tiny ass village in Japan, and in LA,
> quite a large city, and no matter where I go, I see the same
> social trends. There are differences, but people are people. On
> the internet, this is still true.

This references the following law from the Laws of Online World
Design.

  Community size: (http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/laws.html)
  Ideal community size is no larger than 250. Past that, you really
  get subcommunities.

I'm still not convinced that a 250 person group is the maximum group
size one can have.  I'm of the opinion that the group size is
inversely proportional to the depth of the community but that
doesn't mean that a larger group cannot exist.  A smaller group can
have a deeper connection with one another but large groups can have
a shallow, easier to maintain connection.

>> But when the group's numbers go from 100 to the tens of
>> thousands, all sorts of personality types collide - and the
>> picture is (often entertaining but) rarely pretty.

> Not true. You will NEVER have a single community with tens of
> thousands of participants. The number of required connections
> between each person would be astonomical. It will break down into
> smaller, more managable communities.

Again I'm not convinced that this law is truly a law.  Are you
telling me that there was no community surrounding the tragedy of
9/11?  Was it hundreds of separate communities made up of our 250
person community maximum?  What then is the whole idea of
nationalism if it is not a large scale community guided by a simple
but bonding relationship between its members?  I'll grant you that
large communities united under a single purpose are a different
beast then your smaller ones but that does not mean they do not
exist.  There are way too many real world communities that break the
250 person law that we have set for ourselves.  Sure within those
large communities there are sub communities but it's hard to tell me
that the Teamsters union isn't really a community when the entire
lot of them threatens to strike on UPS.  If they were separate 250
person communities then the strike would not be possible.

MMOs have not even begun to design for large scale communities.
Part of the reason used to be technical.  The other part is that
many don't seem to be willing to challenge this law that was founded
in the days where servers were not much larger than 1000 or so
online at a time.  The Laws of Online World Design are a wonderful
thing to think about but continually challenging them is how they
evolve and we finally have the technology to really test the 250
person community law.  Don't get me wrong, the law is pretty sound
for the types of communities that it was intended for.  We now can
do more than that so I think it needs a revision which I'll formally
toss out there for debate.

Modification of the Community Size law: The depth of social
connection between members of a community is inversely proportional
to the size of the community.  This does not imply strength of the
connection, only depth.

A small guild can have deep personal relationships while large
cities can realistically only have a few guiding principles that
unite the members...  There is no "real" limit to the number of
people that can belong to a single community.

Derek
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