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

[Koster, Raph]

Tom "cro" Gordon wrote:
> Derek Licciardi wrote

>> 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

> What I do find interesting about MMO games and MMO game
> development is the pre-existing work and experience in very large
> and ultra large communities is not being applied in any meaningful
> way, and the tools available to create, manage and support these
> communities in an online environment are really not being applied
> as well as they could.

> Since the essence of community is not any one virtual space, but a
> cocnept of identifying with a certain item, game, group or other
> identifying label, you quickly see communities far larger than
> this supposed 250 person limit springin up all over the place.

By this definition, all the big commercial services are running
nicely large communities. The SWG one, for example, is in the
hundreds of thousands.

That said, it's not really accurate. Of those hundreds of thousands,
we have many subcommunities. The one that is directly managed in
terms of interaction is the message board community, which is in the
tens of thousands. But even that one is divided up into
subcommunities on a per forum basis. And so on.

The law is really referring to the size of the smallest nested
community, which is typically scaled based on psychological factors,
not infrastructure. Dunbar's number is worth referencing here, as is
the data I presented at GDC in 203 showing median guild sizes in UO
to be around 60.

This is not an idealistic statement like "we're all a member of the
mud-dev community" or "we're all members of the human community."
Speaking in practical terms, JCL may moderate a larger community but
the community of interactors (and therefore those who can be
directly managed) is significantly smaller, just as our
identification with "the human community" is comparatively weak.

I am unsure which tools you are specificall referring to in your
suite of large-scale community tools, but I'd bet money right now
that a significant portion of them are actually designed to
encourage and support subcommunity formation--and more, intentional
segmentation of the larger userbase.

-Raph
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