[MUD-Dev] Reward system for social gaming?

[Martin Gundtoft]

Hello Everyone,

I'm a student of computer games at the Danish IT-university and currently
in the startup phase of a theoretical, MUD related project.

 We're a small group of students who are interested in examining the
possibility of creating a system for rewarding "socializers" or
encouraging people to use social skills in MMORPG games.

 We believe that (MUD) games in general encourage people to socialize but
that there are no strictly "game mechanical" system in any game that
actually rewards the player directly. Of course one could argue that
large raids or certain other actions would be impossible without a social
game mechanic like the chat box, but what we are looking for is a more
direct way of rewards than such a secondary relation.

 We have been discussing different approaches like a strictly skill based
system in which the skills your avatar would be able to access, and the
levels or skill percentage he would obtain, could be based on the way he
reacts to other people. Maybe this could be implemented through some sort
of voting system. A lot of other things is on the drawing board as well,
but like I said we're very much in the startup phase. Basically what
we're looking for is some system that could reward other forms of
skillful play (in particular social) than merely being a good player in
the traditional sense (killing monsters, other players etc.).

 The reason I'm writing to this list is that as of right now, we don't
really have any litterature or articles that deals with this topic. I
know that there probably isn't anything that deals with this in any
direct way, but what I'm hoping is that the above might ring a bell for
some of You who might have experience from other fields. Basically any
kind of input or thoughts, be it from games that might be interesting in
this context or articles from other fields that could be useful would be
very welcome.

Thanks for your time, I hope to get some feedback on this, just a link or
a title would be very helpful

Best regards

Martin Gundtoft




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