Social Interactions
I’m going to share two very simple stories. Neither story is exceptional, and I’ve experienced/witnessed these repeatedly across many different games with slight variations in the details. Both stories involve being vulnerable to PvP while not particularly wanting to PvP (due to PvE quests that flag you PvP, PvP zones or world PvP zones).
Story 1: Near the end of a tough escort quest, I’m doing a tough escort quest when I end up in a fight before I’m fully healed. Then I get an add, then the escort triggers an ambush. It’s tough, but I’m going to live… until I get killed in one hit by someone higher level who sees me PvP flagged, wounded and outnumbered.
Story 2: I do something that requires a PvP flag, then forget to turn it off. I fight a boss that’s a stretch of my abilities, and a higher level player shows up who can kill me. Instead, he helps me just enough to ensure the boss doesn’t kill me and lets me go.
We don’t spend enough time designing social interactions. Story #1 sucked, while Story #2 was awesome. The second is a positive interaction that makes me amicable towards the game. The first makes me frustrated at the game, even if it doesn’t initially appear to be the game’s fault.
Sidestepping the whole PvP issue, it’s our job to take all the necessary steps to deliver a good experience. It’d be amiss to ignore social interactions as a part of the game that needs design attention to ensure the best experience we can provide. We can’t completely control player behavior, but we can funnel it in the direction we want it to go.
June 24th, 2008 at 8:30 am
When working on PotBS, I kept thinking of griefers and exploiters as the enemy. They tied our hands, screwed up our ideas, and made our (design) lives hell.
I’m coming around to the idea that griefing and exploiting is just a failure on our part, not a flaw in the players. Thinking of those players as the natural state of play, and not as a few bad eggs, might be more helpful than just seeing them as the problem. They aren’t the problem. They’re the reality. Everyone looks for an edge. It’s human nature. Expecting different behavior in an online game is just silly. If anything, it’s the non-griefers, non-exploiters who are the problem. They are adopting a set of behaviors that runs counter to human nature and then becoming outraged when not everyone plays along.
That’s an extreme viewpoint, to be sure, but I’m trying to course correct and exploring the other extreme is a useful approach to doing so.
Basically, I think MMO designers spend too much time trying to construct a civil society. I think a more interesting approach might be to ask: what if we designed a game that was all about griefing, exploiting, and backstabbing, and then looked for corner cases where players could turn the tables and self-enforce a higher standard of civility. We could make the civil society people into the corner case that defines play, the way the griefers define play now.
I dunno where that leads, but I decided to stop thinking of griefers as the enemy and recognize that they are only making the most of an artificial situation we created and put them in. They’re our children.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:24 am
During my time at PotBS, it seems like we spent a negligible time dealing with the social issues in the way that interests me. We spent time *reacting* to potential griefs and exploits, but we didn’t *plan* anything aimed at a specific behavior.
It’s human nature to try to get an advantage, but we also see clear differences between behavior in online worlds and in face to face interaction. It’s the basic internet fuckwad theory. The layer of anonymity and lack of consequences makes it easier to beat up on people. There’s a huge percentage difference in the number of people who’d take advantage of someone who’s in a vulnerable position in a city street compared to in an MMO.
We can take relatively simple steps to encourage behavior. I’m reminded of a small experiment in a book I read dealing. The researchers sent psychology students to a lecture hall on the other side of the campus. They told half the students that the meeting was urgent, and they didn’t say anything to the other half. Along the path, they had an old actor who was hunching over and acting like he was seriously ill or dying. I can’t recall the numbers, but there was a significant correlation between the likelihood that someone who stop and whether they’ve been told the meeting was urgent. It was also amusing because they were going to attend a session on good Samaritans.
On Pirates, most of what I saw involved spending time trying to prevent specific behavior, which just leads to players finding more creative ways around those prevention mechanisms. I’d rather provide an incentive for the behavior we want to encourage. Inclusive is easier than exclusive, and people take delight in finding ways to do things that are supposed to be impossible.