Editorial: It Takes a Village

By Jeffrey Philipp | August 14, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Community, Editorial, Editorials, Game Design, Social Networks

I bid you members of the wider web community welcome.

Today I was thinking about the social nature of our favourite hobby. I think it’s pretty safe to say that MMO’s are simply by their nature a little bit more social than other genres of game. I was just spending some time contemplating what effect, if any that has on the nature of creating and playing the games, so I wanted to put out my thoughts and have some lively discussion.

While it is very likely the least interesting ramification of the subject, the technical debt that such a situation incurs is not insignificant. It certainly isn’t as intensive as, say, creating the fancy graphics or anything like that, but it does add an entire new system with it’s own set of requirements to be considered. I speak, of course, of the ability to chat with other characters in the game, either through a simple implementation of a chat bubble, or chat channels, or even more recently, integrated voice chatting. Leaving the latter out for the moment, as voice chat can actually be a rather sizable undertaking, there are some things to be said about the more standard methods of MMO communication.

I’m sure that I don’t need to go into detail about the workings of the system as everyone already knows about instant messenging, but there is a surprising number of things that you can do wrong when setting the system up. This is one of those features that can suffer very greatly from a goldilocks-esque situation, too much and it’s a distraction, too little and you are apt to miss important messages.

If you are planning on going to route of the chat bubbles, then you also have an artistic decision to be made, albeit a very simple one, but it’s still another asset that has to be drawn as well as considered in all of the environments present in the game. It would be a real shame to have chat bubbles be the thing that brought you out of a well designed world. Like I said, these are not game breaking decisions, but things like transparency, persistence, size. There are good and bad examples everywhere, bubbles that put large messages in, but don’t stay visible long enough to read them, forcing you to look down at the chat panel anyway. Bubbles that pop up and cover a quarter of the screen. It is my opinion that a well done chat system is something that players will never notice unless they’re actively using it.

By and large the chat channel system is very likely to be greatly similar to the bubbles, though a little more discreet. The desire there is to pull just the right amount of information and display it to the user. It’s never fun to wind up with a dozen tabs in a chat window for the various things you need to pay attention to, likewise getting all of everything and never being to read any of it until you actively take some time to sit back and read it all.

But I’ve talked for too long about the technical bits of the social network in games. A much more important effect of putting a lot of people together in what is essentially a single space is getting them to play nice. This is truly a situation unique to online games, because it doesn’t matter at all how great your game is if the people you’re playing it with are nothing more than, or possibly a step below, screeching retarded howler monkeys. This is the sort of problem that can actually make playing a game not fun, and this could happen in a number of ways. Having a not quite robust enough method of tracking and eliminating spam can turn the whole situation into nothing more than dross with normal mapping, even if the game is fantastic. A game with the most forward thinking and innovative method of combat, that could possibly revolutionize the industry, will be shut down in months if it allows racist or hateful speech to go unpunished.

Those are just a couple of the more serious examples, but there are many more from begging to griefing, and they each have solutions, though none perfect, and many often involving liberal use of the well worn ban-hammer. On the other side of that particular coin though, a healthy and helpful community can rocket a game from mere mediocrity to an enjoyable way to spend a good chunk of time.

I grant you that perhaps the game and it’s designers may have less to do with a community making a game good, but they must have had some hand in it by at least making the social interface usable enough for a community of good people to interact. The thing that a developer has to think about when it comes to community building has less to do with getting the right people, as the hope is that they will come if the game is good enough, but rather making sure that like minded players have sinmple enough ways to find each other, and then after they have found each other uncomplicated ways to maintain communication.

The funny thing about that is, while it may sound dated and lo-fi, teh simplest way to do that is to make an official forum space, and then to make sure that it’s widely known. It’s shocking how many developers don’t implement this particular feature, or have official forums but treat them largely as a place for tech support and troubleshooting.

Perhaps it is a particular peculiarity of MMO gamers that we are for some reason just more apt to create and maintain connections and communities within our games, or it may very well be a factor of the social nature and tools available in this games that creates these communities, but there is absolutely no question that MMO gamers are social animals. Like I said above, there are few things that developers can do to influence the community that happens to build up around their game, the thing that they can and absolutely should do is make sure that it’s possible for a community to sustain itself when it does.

It’s true there is a risk that you might wind up with a community of Xbox and Halo fans (Oops, is my bias showing?), but I think that by far the bigger risk is not allowing the truly great players that you might have had leave because they couldn’t find people who shared their particular passion for whatever aspect of the game they enjoy.

I’m honestly curious to hear what other people think about the subject, so drop us a line, toss up a comment, we’ll have some spirited discussion, and maybe even a debate (or shouting match if you prefer that sort of thing).

Until next time!