Design notebook: Gaming and the Dunbar number

[evilhat]

I'm hoping to make a series of short posts on "how MMO design influenced the design of The Road to Amber MUSH". A lot of research went into our previous commercial MMO design foray, and a number of things we learned are applicable to a broad spectrum of games, not just MMOs.
This first post is on the Dunbar number, group size, and its applicability

Comments

[malkin]

I tend to refer to locations (and channels) like the World's End Bar as the "central stage." It is essential for some very important purposes:

1.) Many newbies don't know anyone in the game, and they really need someplace where they will be guaranteed to run into other players.

2.) All players, newbies or otherwise, need a place where they can find "pick-up" play. (Like pick-up basketball, or a pick-up group in an MMO.)

3.) It serves as a place where disparate social groups (who would otherwise not interact) have the opportunity to cross-pollinate.

4.) It is a place where less experienced players can learn the community social norms from more experienced players. (Sadly, in WoW, this means lots of yammering about Chuck Norris in The Barrens.)

And it IS, indeed, true: We actively worked against some of the things AmberMUSH society needed, for genre/simulation reasons. In hindsight, we were being quite silly. But, as gnarled veterans, we have much more sophisticated mental models for how players inhabit our games, today. If we knew then what we know now, the game might have been quite different.

Personally, I've been long convinced that the emergence of cliques is a survival mechanism, of sorts. Imposing social norms on September after September (and eventually endless Septembers) of new players gets exhausting after a while. I think people really get newbie fatigue, eventually. As veteran players increasingly withdraw from the unwashed heathens, the kids, in turn, absorb increasingly diluted forms of the veteran's culture. This culture drift is a vicious cycle. Eventually, the veterans grow to be so out-of-touch with the average player that they only play with their own little cliques. And heck, they hardly even need your game to do that.

Cliques are both good and bad. Initially, they can be quite good. They give people a sort of social identity that increases their sense of importance and feeling of ownership in the game. Moreover, they provide a steady group of playmates, and a sense of "family" and "home." Additionally, they create play motivations (I would like to be part of clique A, or I hate clique B, or my clique is fighting with clique C for a critical resource). It is only at the isolationist stage that they really become a serious problem.

So, I think that the real win is in finding a motivation for cliques to stay engaged with one another, and to continue communicating with new players, so they don't end up locked out in the cold. That could be potentially accomplished through game mechanics and/or award systems. (Though a social advancement system like AmberMUSH's is an insufficient motivator; veterans were able to rest on their laurels for entirely too long in that system.)