On Rewarding Socialization In MMORPGs

Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing how social interaction affects gameplay in MMO titles. The piece suggests: "That the majority of MMORPGs, MUDs, and other multiplayer games ultimately support achiever players over socializers, or even killers, I think begins to outline how poorly we understand - and support - true social interactions in today's multiplayer games." It goes on to discuss freeform socialization ("We slap a chatline into a game. Then we spend as much time making it look nice"), competitive socialization ("the richest form of interaction possible in multiplayer games, yet ironically it's more often been seen as a problem than as a potential virtue"), and co-operative socialization ("One of the few games that has really tried to push this envelope is Asheron's Call with its ideas for feudal structures.")

Comments

The competition needs to be more organized

[Jaeph]

RvR in Camelot was a great step, but more needs to be added. I believe developers need to borrow more from sports. For example:

1) Clearer rules, tougher refs. We've all complained when people get away with cheating. I believe that every game needs to be monstrously despotic in tone when it comes to the rules of its game. However, to facilitate this people need to be clear on what is an infraction, and what isn't one. Too often I see a tactic labelled an exploit, and players penalized for limits in the game engine, especially AI. (No, I don't perch or anything like it.)

2) Announced victors, new seasons, culminating events. People don't simply play baseball forever: there's a set season, and at the end of the playoffs a victor is determined and people move forward. Imagine DAoC where every year from November to the new year the top 3 realms (or best of each realm) were allowed to transfer their characters to a new server where they competed for the championship. (Determined by keep-taking, kill ratio, and so on.)

Why focus on competition? Because that's the essence of any game. I think most games tend to lack a robust competitive environment; once that exists, I feel the support elements (crafting, etc) will take on added importance in the grand scheme. But again, for that to happen, the competative environment must be honed.

-Jeff

P.S. Sorry for the rambling nature of this. Late night, early morning, the usual... :-)

Dark and Light

[Don Calamari]

The designers of Dark and Light are trying to implement somthing they call Social Experience. While I don't think this is a new concept (A few MUDs tried this, IIRC) it may be one of the first "mainstream" MMO titles to try in a fantasy setting.

The game is in early beta and has some other really cool concepts. Go check it out, the screenshots are awesome and the community so far is friendly and helpful.

A Tale in the Desert

[beholder77]

.... really encourages socialization to advance.

I've been playing the game for a few weeks now (since a slashdot story mentioned it :), and I've found the game to be very deep and downright difficult to advance without the help of others. The first time you notice this is right on the newbie island where all characters start. Typically there are people trying to achieve one of their leadership tests (having other people build totems to them) on the newbie island acting as mentors. The mentors job is to help the newbies understand the game, and get them past the first challenge, which is to get from the newb island to Egypt mainland. This is the first time I've seen socilization rewarded in a game.

For Tale, it doesn't stop there. Once you are in Egypt, you realize the game is massive and complex. You simply can't build everything you need to advance your skills in the game without trading resources with others. The best way to do this is join a guild (or guilds, it allows multiple). Guilds in Tale are a social structure. Most likely you will join the guild that your mentor belongs to, and it will be your primary. Once you explore the world for a while, you find other people who want you to join their guild and might have resources not available to you in your current location.

I would almost say it's enforced socialization, but it doesn't feel that way when you play. Achievement is so much *easier* with socilization.

Milcis has this

[theefer]

I'm the lead game designer for an amateur french MMORPG set in a new universe. It is called Milcis. Now apart from the apparent self-advertising look of this post, I have to say this is a very interesting concern we have discussed from early on. We now have developped a game design device called the "triplette", which is a set of three "variables" (Power, Discovery, Invention). Basically, the goal of the triplette is to allow the player to rate the respect they have for other players.

You may say this is open grounds for cheaters. This is, and this is why we had to think a lot about the way the player can use it and cheat. The Slashdot moderation system is obviously a good example of a quite good rewarding system.

Any player can gain triplette either by achieving quests, or by recieving points by other players. It is a pyramidal system that should hopefully balance itself. I won't dive too deep into the rules unless someone is really interested though ..
Then the interesting thing is the usage of the triplette. It is needed to improve one's magical abilities.

So in Milcis, players can still play hack'n slash, get a huge strength and be the big barbarian we all know (actually, the permadeath makes it harder for PK, but it's not the point here). On the other hand, social players are rewarded with magic abilities (offensive or defensive depending on the magic).

I just wanted to show that, whereas this is not necessarily new to MUD players, there are some MMORPGs (even amateur ones) taking this path of rewarding social behavior and tiding it to the very core of the gameplay and the background. I hope professional developpers will ultimately try this idea too, since it seems like a major requirement to prevent MMORPGs from encouraging hack'n slashers and dumb power-leveling.

Re:Of Course Social Interaction Isn't Well Support

[ShannonA]

The point is that there are more types of social interaction than just those allowed by chat lines. In particular there are many competitive and cooperative actions that aren't generally supported. I'm going to discuss those starting in my article two weeks from now. Shannon

Accountability

[Cyphertube]

I have found that the biggest problem for any MMOG, let along MMORPGs, has been that accounts can get banned, but people don't. There's nothing to keep 'Joe Obnoxious' from getting back on. And since sometimes these people have more money than social skills, they'll buy another copy just to get another valid CD-key to get on and start annoying people again.

As a member of the RPGA, I've been impressed that we have formalised procedures to ban people. Ok, you have to pretty much assault someone to get banned (and some of these guys are HUGE, so assault would be scary), but at least we deal with real people.

What I would love to see is some 3rd-party system that verifies identity. Maybe you can gain points that lead towards beta-testing, prizes, etc. by being a good player over time. You'd have this ID account, and then you could have multiple gaming accounts attached. Say you play about 20 different games. Well one community may hate and ban you, but you'd have to really ruin it all over the place to get permanently banned.

Random Sunday morning rambling, but I know this is the kind of thing that would enable my parents to be online gamers and maybe even pay a subscription for games. From my management experience, this could seriously grow the market.