Ways to make your social space more gamey

Chat is never enough.

It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t ever form the nubbin of a community.

It’s probably a cliche to even bring up pearls. Pearls happen inside oysters and mussels (or at least they used to, before we all got used to artificial ones). They aren’t formed around grains of sand specifically, but rather around irritants of many sorts, usually quite tiny ones. The pearl is a protective mechanism, something that wraps around the irritation. In the wild, this happens very rarely — you have to go through hundreds of oysters to find a pearl, and even then, it might not be much of one. But since the 1920s or so, we have cultured pearls, making them happen on purpose.

In the last long post, I talked about how to make a game world more social. In this post, I want to do the opposite — talk about ways to add the irritant that causes the pearl to form. Social interaction is a pearl of great price, especially in worlds devoted to it; and yet, this pearl does not form easily without prompting. And the prompting often takes the form of an irritant.

First comes another truism:

Chat happens.

Talking is people’s default social activity. Think back to any time you have been in a crowd of any size. Try to think of what you heard. It was never silence. It was the incessant murmur of voices. Humans use basic information exchange for many purposes: for emotional connections, for survival purposes (there have been great studies on the importance of gossip, for example), for status negotiation and display… we are social animals, fundamentally, and sitting companionably in silence is something that we only do with people we know very well, or have no desire to know at all. And the latter is something that makes us uncomfortable. We avert eyes, go into a sort of turtle mode.

So given even slightly conducive conditions, chat happens. The turtle mode is often broken simply by having one brave soul willing to say something.

That said, getting more people to break out of turtle mode requires a bit of a kick in the butt. After all, forming a new social connection is a risk. You never know if the person there is a freak, is going to pester you or stalk you, is going to want to sleep with you when all you wanted was to say hello, or is possibly (horror) someone who might send you fruitcake at Christmas. Then again, they might become your spouse. Our odds calculation here depends heavily on all kinds of factors, but there’s some tried and true mechanisms that we can steal from other kinds of places that do this for a living. And what a surprise, they boil down to ambience, reducing barriers, and… things to do.

Ambience matters a lot; there are countless cues that we absorb that signal that something is a social event. The shape of tables at dinner, the size and shape of the room… these all have an effect. And in tmers of reducing barriers, of course, we have long relied on drugs of various sorts that alter our personalities and reduce inhibition, leading to increased risk-taking behavior. The commonest of these drugs is, of course, alcohol.

Social worlds do these first two things fairly well already. Ambience is a huge element in doing any worldbuilding at all anyway, and because of the disinhibition inherent in computer-mediated communication (particularly anonymous and pseudonymous communication), you kind of already get the effect that you would by giving everyone alcohol. You could think of pseudonymity (using a fake name, but consistently, so it acquires a reputation) as being buzzed, and anonymity (no connection between a name and a reputation) as being drunk, in terms of the effects that it has on people.

Ah, but then you hit things to do. Throughout history we find that social spaces have had activities present in order to provide something to talk about. Bowling alleys had bowling, then added arcade games. Bars have trivia, or bands. All sorts of places have food. The list goes on and on. This is a curious thing, because all of these serve as distractions from socializing. If you’re trying hard to bowl well, you want to be focused, not chattering away. You want to give it intense attention, which leads to a cognitive peak. And as I have discussed before, peak attention moments leave little brain to spare for other things like socializing — which is itself a highly brain-intensive activity.

So these distractions are pushing against the desire to socialize. They are irritants. But from the irritant comes the pearl. You see, social chit-chat may seem trivial, but it goes through specific and known phases.

• Gossip, for example, may seem meaningless, but it’s actually a highly efficient information exchange network, conveying critical information about adjustments in the social relationships of our circle of acquaintances. We measure relative status (“did you see what she’s wearing?”), prosperity (“They just splurged on a new car…”), sexual connections (“I hear that he’s sleeping with…”), health (“There’s a stomach flu going around…”), alliances and enmities (“She’s such a bitch”)… and we do it because we need to know these things so that we can establish our own positions in the hierarchy of the group, know what risks we face, know how to interact with others, who we can ask for favors, and who needs help.
• It may seem silly that as we grasp for a topic when meeting someone we have to reach for “how’s the weather” or “how about them <insert sports team here>”, but we do so with good reason. Weather is a shared experience (and in agrarian cultures, of desperate importance). Sports are forms of tribal affiliation. Throughout history, people not of your tribe were automatically threats to you, until proven otherwise. Similarly, when we try to figure out whether we have a mutual acquaintance, it’s a way to determine the extent of our shared social network — whether we are “belonging.”
• Clothing and dress acts as armor; formality of dress serves as a cue as to the closeness of the relationship, either real or potential. Loosening one’s tie, doffing a hat, “take off your coat and stay a while,” leaving your weapons at the door, “letting your hair down.”
• In countless cultures, there’s an important step: sharing food. Strangers who have broken bread with you are no longer strangers. The sharing of precious resources makes someone a closer member of your social group. Doing so in your home is even more of a bond than doing so elsewhere.
• Finally, we engage in activities — especially group activities — as a way to learn more about each other. The sense of shared struggle is a powerful bonding experience, and one can learn a huge amount about who other people are by how they react to various high pressure situations.

When looking at highly successful social experiences in the real world, we find that they are designed to encourage social activity by providing activities as irritants. Indeed, areas such as vacation resorts are created in order to prompt constant activity. It isn’t an accident that the alcohol (disinhibiting factor) is next to the pool or beach (environment with little clothing) where they offer horseback rides (activity) and a luau (communal meal). Tour groups are given names, or hats, or leis, or other tribal markers for mutual self-identification, and perhaps the tour guide is our personal trial that we suffer through together…

Given this, it is curious that we often use the phrase “theme park” to describe MMORPGs that are on rails — but theme parks are designed as social experiences. You’re supposed to enjoy them with your family and friends. Wandering around one by yourself actually conjures up melancholy and loneliness, and empty ones are classic settings for horror and disquiet, because we are bombarded with cues that we ought to be with people. The dissonance breeds fear. In practice, a social virtual world is actually a closer analogy to a theme park than World of Warcraft is; a strongly GoP world (“goal-oriented play” world, an old MUD-Dev term)  is kind of like a theme park of only rides, with no courtyards, strollways, and picnic areas.

If we break down the elements above that lead to tighter social groupings, and make them abstract, we’re going to find that they go something like this:

1. Sharing of supposed trivia
2. Signs of relative status
3. Group identity and tribal affiliation markers
4. Controllable presentation differences
5. Sharing of scarce resources, both in public and private
6. Shared struggle towards a common goal
7. High pressure situations

So great, let’s add some things to do. Our models are almost all going to turn out to be entertainment, because it so happens that the best way to get all the above in a low-risk setting is to play together. Look at that above list and then look at what happens in an MMORPG:

• Lots of little details to share knowledge about: quests, tactics, patch info…
• Lots of axes on which to measure status: gold, XP, mounts, housing…
• Lots of tribal affiliation markers: realm, class, guild, race…
• Lots of presentation differences: equipment, gear, gender (!)
• Scarce resources to share: drops, XP… (it’s no accident we call this “farming.”)
• Shared struggle: combat, quests, raids…
• High pressure situations: chance of death, loss of time, loss of gear…

At the same time, we don’t want to overwhelm the social world with too much game. That would lead to the problems seen on the other end of the spectrum, covered in the last post. So what has been historically successful and is directly applicable just to social worlds?

• Groups. Provide clear group identities that users can join, leave, and signal to one another with highly visual markers.
• Work against The Other. Set groups against each other to provide friction. The task can be fairly meaningless or even non-confrontational, like which team gets more points, or raises more money for charity.
• Collaborative building is a great social shared struggle that provides the bonding without the aggression.
• A scarce resource that users can gift one another. There’s a reason why $1 microtransaction gifts are now a common feature of social sites. Collection mechanics also drive this very strongly.
• Charity projects. The equivalent of throwing a communal meal — something where everyone gives something up for the larger group.
• Competitive metrics. Give users means to rate themselves against each other on multiple different axes. Simple leaderboards go a long way. Ratings on objects, actions, or user contributions.
• Social minigames which provide inadvertant information transfer. Trivia answers tell you a lot about the person answering, for example. A great model is the party game Apples to Apples, one of the greatest social play experiences ever created.
• Reward loops. You have to provide feedback to the user that these actions are desirable ones to take.

Of course, the important thing isn’t the list, it’s the underlying principles. From those you can derive all sorts of things. The key lesson, however, is that “pure chat” worlds have always hit audience limitations in large part because they were less social than the games were on many of these key areas. Think how many social worlds you have seen with no minigames, no scarce resources, no large-scale tasks, and no sense of teams or tribes. This is a case where making your social world more gamey makes it, in fact, more social.