Downtime is Necessary for Socialization
This is a concept I have always believed strongly in, and Raph Koster just wrote an excellent blog article about it: Ways to make your virtual space more social. He makes a lot of great points, but I am going to focus specifically on the concept that game developers must engage in some degree of social engineering when they make a game, and for a virtual world game they MUST take steps to force people to slow down, hang out, and socialize with others.
You Can’t Chat While Hammering the 1, 2, 3, Buttons
This is one area where the MUD command line UI always had an advantage. No matter what you were doing, your cursor was always in the right place for chatting. But in graphical games, web games, or even MUDs with advanced clients, you aren’t always right at a command line. So chatting while fighting, running from place to place, etc. is not that easy. If you want people to have meaningful interactions, you need them to stop and take a break now and then.
On a Treadmill, There’s Nowhere to Go but Forward
If your game design pushes people along constantly, always seeking that next carrot, or next level, or next gear upgrade, they will feel like any break in the action is falling behind. In that kind of game world, it is really hard to get people to do anything that is not indicative of “progress.” Players will feel like stopping to watch someone put on a play, or attending a wedding, or participating in a debate, are all things that will simply result in their character falling behind in levels. Heavy treadmill games, or games that always push people from hub to hub and zone to zone make it harder for people to socialize.
What Do You Think?
You readers know by now I mostly love hearing what you think. I like discussion more than I like just spouting off my own thoughts. So give me your opinion. Is downtime important for making social interaction possible? Can you actually hurt the social aspect of a game by making the “game” aspect too “motivating” (for lack of a better word)?
I’m the player that Ralph has described. I’ve called it tinkering and puttering around. I can NOT spend all of my in-game time doing quests and killing mobs. I probably spend less than half of my time engaged in leveling/combat oriented activities. In fact, one measure I can use to judge a game’s depth, fun-factor and appeal for me, is how much time I am leveling. The more the game is focused on leveling the quicker I’ll be gone.
I must have those downtime pursuits but they don’t necessarily require socialization. I need time for my brain to process and enjoy the virtual world I’m wandering around in – crafting, exploring, fluff activity and trying to build some level of economic security. The last thing is standing around BS in regional chat. I’d do it more but finding a good community in massively popular games is very hit and miss.
“I must have those downtime pursuits but they don’t necessarily require socialization.”
That’s the key to me. The goal shouldn’t be to get people to socialize; that’s just forcing a certain game play style, and it’s no better than forcing everyone into raiding grinds. The goal should be to give people options, and reasons for playing in your world, not just playing the designer’s game, whether that game is raiding, socializing, exploring, achieving, or whatever else. MMOs, more than any other game, have a wide player base with wildly divergent interests. Trying to force players into one “golden path” that is optimal play *in the designer’s mind* is a fool’s errand.
Put another way, my Bartle test read as a EASK, 100/50/50/0. In other words, I Explore at all opportunities, Achieve or Socialize only when I can’t explore, and I’m not interested at all in Killing. I don’t want a game that forces me to be social, just like a KSAE won’t want a game that forces them to explore. The “it’s an MMO, it must be social, players must socialize” bit is just as dumb as gearing a game for any of the other types. There must be balance, and a plethora of options, not railroading.
I think the word “downtime” has become a loaded word. People associate it so deeply with “standing around doing nothing waiting for mana to regen” that it is hard to use it in any other context.
Forced socialization is bad, just as forced grouping. But mental downtime – time where enough of a % of your brain is available for other tasks – is important. You need to create situations where the players are not 100% concentrated on the action of the game so socialization CAN happen.
The reality for MMOs is that without socialization, your membership becomes extremely transient. If people do not make social connections with other players it will become extremely easy for them to quit. That’s bad for maintaining your population.
So developers MUST ensure that socialization happens, or else their population will suffer.
“Forced socialization is bad, just as forced grouping.”
I question the general assumption that this statement is true.
Definition of ’social norm’ – The usual pattern of behavior that is considered normal among others.
Members of a society will generally conform to whatever social norms are in place, often even if they don’t fully understand or appreciate the purpose or origin of the norm. Marriage is an example of a social norm in western society today. People that do not hold religious beliefs regarding marriage still get married. Why? Because our society tells us that it’s an important part of life, it’s a social norm.
Just like real life MMOs contain their own culture with their own social norms. The social norms in EverQuest differ greatly from the social norms in WoW. I believe most people would agree that EverQuest had a healthy amount of social interaction in it, even if it was somewhat forced.
The first thing I ever tell anyone about EverQuest and why I loved it so much is that it was because she was a harsh mistress. EverQuest was EverQuest. No ifs ands or buts. There were 20 minute corpse runs, un-leveling like you would never believe, lots of wasted hours waiting for respawns, and health regen and mana that crawled like nothing anyone that plays WoW could even fathom. All those things could be seen as flaws but EverQuest never asked for forgiveness, didn’t try to make it easy on you, and yet at the same time relentlessly compelled many people to play an extreme number of hours per week. Forced grouping took place almost every time you logged on in this game, but no one complained. At character creation you looked at the classes in front of you and you picked what you wanted to play, all the while with the understanding that if you picked a specific class you would almost never ever solo.
This was normal. In a game today this would simply not fly. The game dynamics, including forced grouping and slow hp/mana regen, created the social norms for EverQuest. in EverQuest it was considered business as usual to log in, find a group, kill for a while, and log out. In that time if you had a talkitive group then you could chat in between spawns, or you could just grind away in silence. There were no other expectations, and there were no promises of excitement. When you logged on you either had fun doing what you were doing or you got up from your computer and did something else.
The gameplay in WoW is far on the opposite side of the spectrum. It is unusual for someone to group for normal quests because of the way their quests are designed and therefore grouping for normal questing is considered deviant behavior. Deviant behavior is ONLY behavior that falls outside of the social norms of a culture, it’s not inherently sinister. There is social behavior in WoW however. I’m sure everyone who has spent much time playing WoW is familiar with “barrens chat” or now it’s “trade channel chat”. There are a few other types of chat that make up WoW’s social core and those are “guild chat” and zone-wide “General chat”.
All of these forms of chat are quite often plagued by juvenile and often moronic arguing. Finding a guild that is not flooded with idle chatter can also be difficult. EverQuest only didn’t have these problems because it was not a social norm to make idle chit chat about politics in the /ooc channel (it still had its roots in real RP. It saddens me greatly when people don’t know what ooc is (Out of Character for those of you who don’t know)).
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I’m not being concise here. Time to wrap up my thoughts. It seems to me that game design affects social norms, which affect how people play games.
I believe the developers have a lot of control over how people act while they play their game, and that they can encourage socializing in their games ONLY by making it normal to group. EQ2 tried to create some diabolic interdependency scheme for their crafting, which would have promoted happy socializing if it wasn’t plagued with people so obsessed with manipulating the economy to their will that the system became more vindictive than anything.
People will adapt to the situation they are in. If people are put into a world where the environment is constantly pushing them to level alone then it will become an unusual thing for socialization to occur in the form of grouping. If the game forces grouping then people will embrace the socialization that it brings as a usual and normal thing.
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The problem with all this is that now we have tons and tons of MMOs. There is now not just a culture associated with each individual game, but a culture surrounding all of the games. EverQuest could never regain popularity in its original form (as far as I can see) because it is the social norm amongst ALL MMO players that forced grouping is bad, and also I believe that people consider long downtime due to low hp/mana regen rates a bad thing as well. Because MMO gamers have essentially been told “you shouldn’t have to wait so long for hp/mana, fights shouldn’t last so long, and you should be able to do whatever you want on your own!” I don’t think they will ever go be able to go back from the single-player-MMORPG craze that looks to be consuming us.
Granted not everyone is the same, Lord knows I would love to see EQ ressurected with only the first few expansions intact, but a large portion of the MMORPG market is completely sold on games with the same basic formula- and I don’t think that that formula is in any way conducive to the socializing we’re talking about here.
@Jedi – The social norm aspects of your reply are very insightful. I hadn’t considered how much the game design impacts what becomes that game’s social norm. EQ2 has a great community which we instantly associated with audience age maturity. Age is likely a factor but it’s probably equally impacted by the game’s design which had for many years had enforced cooperation mechanics. Even though much of that has now been relaxed the effect and establishment of EQ2 is a cooperative community is already set in place. Hmm, that’s very interesting. That will be on my mind now as I interact in different gaming communities.
I can already see how/why the W101 community isn’t as close knit or polite beyond there being young players. Much of the game can be completed solo. Selecting gear, cards and play strategy very “you” focused that the players you encounter tend to behave in a selfish way – at least can be considered rude and inconsiderate. Pulling more mobs into your combat without regard for the fact that you might not want to stay and fight more, your health/mana or if you have enough of the right cards left in your hand to continue. Players popping in and out on you via the “transport to” feature etc. For all the cuteness it is a very ME centric game and it sort of shows.
Contrast that with Runes of Magic and I find people to be more considerate and helpful. Of course you have idiots but I’ve yet to ask for help and not received the help needed. People dismounting to help you out of a tough spot. People handing your gear, getting on their main to help you kill something, complete quests, etc. I’m often surprised at the difference between this community and what I remember from WOW. I had been attributing it to still being in BETA and when the masses come the community will be like WOW but maybe not. You can solo about as well as you can in WOW. However, there are named mobs and mini bosses that can’t be completed alone. Unlike WOW, crafting is very interdependent more like EQ2 so you need each other more. And the game is still at a point where no one has all the answers so you have to talk to each other and help each other get by. Hmm, “game mechanics impacting the social norm”. Yeah, I think that idea is a winner.
I think the way all of these different preferences and gameplay styles can be merged is if the MMO industry can return its focus to making virtual WORLDS rather than just monster vendor games.
You can have all the monster bashing and loot gathering you want in a virtual world. But you also have social activities, non-combat activities, and things that make you feel like a resident of a world.
In a world, you also don’t feel the same rush to “level cap” and “end game.” Level cap is what, 120 years old, and end game is being buried. Not so amazing. But when the MMO is just a game, why not rush for the finish line?
I’d like to submit that PVP is a form of socialization. It builds rivalries and friendships, and is by definition player to player interaction. Communities are created to both indulge in it, and to resist it. I’ve made alot of friends through PVP over the years, in general the only people I associate with in an mmo(with the obvious exception of Threshold, which is an actual RP game) are either people that I know from outside of the game, or with people I enjoyed fighting against/with.
I think I see where you are going with this, but I can’t really classify PvP itself as socialization. I think socialization happens if people participating in PvP have some downtime.
PvP by itself doesn’t create the kind of social bonds that will keep you playing a game. In fact, PvP can easily make someone quit, because getting owned by other players is one of the most frustrating things possible – especially if they are truly better and you have no hope of ever getting revenge. FPS games are an example of this. They are basically non-meaningful PvP with no virtual world context to keep people together beyond the actual PvP matches. As a result, there’s little or no socialization unless you join a “clan.”
There is actual socialization that happens around PvP, as players plan and powwow with each other for how they intend to engage in PvP. But even this is really only true in games that have “meaningful” or objective-based PvP.
But PvE triggers that type of socialization, as does raiding. And I wouldn’t call PvE or raiding socialization.
The fact that socialization can happen before or after a type of activity does not make that activity socialization.
PvP related socialization can happen is if there is downtime. Like the time you stand in a keep with people waiting for a possible attack. Or the time you spend planning an attack. Or the time you spend waiting for a control point to change so you can attack it.
I agree that PvP can be a feature that lends itself to socialization – but only if there is mental downtime and a world context to make the PvP matter.
PVP tends to have downtime built into it. Defending keeps and control points, as you note. Waiting for respawn is another big one(note this leads to socialization in FPS games that have it as well). PVP downtime tends to feel pretty natural, as it is either a death consequence, or you are still doing something important despite the fact you aren’t hammering 1,2,3.
I agree that meaningful PvP tends to have inherent downtime. And those downtimes can lead to the forging of significant social bonds. I can vidily remember times in DAoC where Milawe and I would manage to get inside a keep with just a few others, and mount a desperate defense. In between waves of attackers, the defenders would discuss our plans and try to figure out how to repel the invaders. The fact that it was a shared experience was also huge for purposes of socialization. When the defense was over, the other people there turned from strangers to close friends, and often long term gaming friendships were immediately born.
But compare that to say, Left 4 Dead. Most of the time people do not even talk to each other, and when they do it is super basic. When a game ends, everyone goes their own way. Since there is no real effect on any kind of game world, there is no reason for people to hang around.
So the downtime lesson is once again shown through PvP. If you give people time to actually communicate, they will. And the bonds forged will be significant and meaningful.
I don’t think pvp has to be “meaningful” to create this effect. In my FPS experience, most players that play over a long span of time(weeks, months, or years) wind up playing a few servers over and over again. A popular FPS server will usually develop a community of some sort. Players recognize eachother and chat, trash talk, plan, etc, despite the fact that they are only battling for a temporary victory that is basically “meaningless”.
I’ve never experienced any of that myself while playing FPSes, and I’ve never heard of people continuing to play an FPS simply because they like the people they play with. The FPS experience is extremely transient, and people move from game to game with extreme fluidity. So I really do not think they are establishing anywhere near the level of socialization that an MMO can and needs to in order to maintain a consistent userbase.
Hmm, perhaps I’m defining community differently than you are. “like the people they play with” is a pretty narrow definition, from my perspective. I think “like playing with these people” is a better definition. I don’t have to like somebody in order to like playing with them(mostly because my goal is typically to compete with them in some way). As a friend of mine would put it “pvpers don’t sit around the campfire holding hands and singing kumbaya”.
That being said though, communities and friendships do develop in FPS games. There’s still a couple of Soldier of Fortune 2 servers that I can connect to and be immediately recognized, asked where I’ve been, etc, despite the fact I haven’t played that game seriously in about 4 years. FPS games wouldn’t exist without a community. Nobody wants to play vs the computer. Games such as Counterstrike and the Battlefield series have managed to maintain large playerbases for years. Those playerbases are communities, with many subcommunities. They develop around clans, servers, specific mods, specific rulesets, forums devoted to the game, etc. People that play these games casually may not notice them, but the longer you play the more likely you’ll see them and the more likely you’ll become a part of them.
Note that this is more true of fps games with downtime. I think part of the reason Counterstrike did so well is because of the relationships formed between the players during downtime. Basically, once you die in Counterstrike, you stay dead until the end of the round, and a round could easily be 5 minutes long. About all you could do during that time is watch the live players, and chat with the other dead players. In a instant respawn game like Unreal Tournament, FAR less socializing occurs because you are always running and gunning. The “dead until the end of the round” style FPS games have utterly dominated instant respawn games over the last few years, and I think the socialization has something to do with it.
Another good example of pvp downtime leading to socialization would be Street Fighter 2(and the various other games that tried to milk that cash cow). The arcade etiquette was that once you lost, you had to go to the back of the line and await your next shot. Online versions of Street Fighter have kept this etiquette intact, despite the fact they could probably eliminate it for the most part mechanically. In the online versions, you join a server of 4-6 people, only two people fighting at a time. The winner keeps fighting, the loser goes to the back of the line.
That is a very interesting example from arcade fighting games. The “forced downtime” of waiting your turn gave people time to hang out, chat, and make friends.
That’s brilliant that they decided to keep that mechanic in online gameplay.
Wow. That’s an AWESOME example. Thanks Outsider!