Altruism
Happiness and the human brain are great subjects for game designers to research. Whenever I spend time on the subjects, I inevitably end up reading about altruism and how it affects people. So I’m going to briefly talk about happiness, altruism, intrinsic motivations and MMOs.
Altruistic actions leads to a variety of positive feelings, all of which contribute to general happiness. Doing things for people feels good, but it wouldn’t be an interesting subject if it was that simple and there weren’t any points of contention!
In the context of an MMO, things that “help me” directly benefit one player. When players help each other, it indirectly benefits at least two players. One of the cool things about altruism is a simple elementary school lesson - it spreads, thereby hitting even more players. MMO altruism typically involves complete strangers, such as a high level player buffing/healing players in low level zones. Although altruism is uplifting, it isn’t driven by intrinsic motivations. Even if it’s human nature to take a degree of satisfaction from altruistic actions, looking out for yourself is a much more prevalent drive. It’s easy to motivate players to do something for themselves, because there’s already such a strong intrinsic force. It’s not easy to motivate them to do something for other people, especially strangers. Generally, altruism involves strangers.
MMOs don’t reward players for altruistic actions. We don’t do anything to encourage it, so the action itself is the only reward. Since it’s not a typical intrinsic motivations. We could encourage it if we wanted. Should we? Would altruism have the same effect if it had a quantifiable in game benefit? Would it work at all? If we tried to encourage it, we’d have to be very careful because you can’t force altruism. That creates an entirely different feeling, such as resentment. Everquest made me feel resentment on numerous occasions because I felt “forced” to do things for people due to poor mechanics.