Jared Diamond applied to virtual worlds
I am a fan of the writings of Jared Diamond, author of several award-wiunning books on anthropology and biology, and how they inform social formation. These posts are about applying some of the insights in his work to the design of virtual worlds.
Much of UO’s tensions can be seen as various subcommunities competing for territory and resources–resources in terms of in-game enjoyment and mindshare from the developers, as well as literal resources in the game.
I think there was also a difference in type among players. Many of those that UO attracted were completely new to online games, and the more people we got, the more notable the differences in patterns of behavior. Many were more casual about the game, they had different play patterns than the hardcore early adopters, etc. In smaller muds, you usually ONLY see the hardcore, and rarely get significantly sized groups of complete novices, computer illiterates, online newbies, etc.
(For those who do not know: the highest level zones in EQ are in demand enough that players have organized schedules wherein guilds sign up for timeslots to tackle the area. This arose spontaneously from the playerbase, and is enforced by custom, though at this point I believe the in-game admins have been known to uphold “reservations.” Similarly, at spawn locations a curious etiquette has evolved whereby there’s a prescribed order in terms of who gets to kill the spawning mob first and who gets to loot it; players literally stand in line and await their turn. Those who jump the queue are ostracized).
Now, certainly “scale” is being used very loosely here, and is in fact referring to density and simultaneous player size and world size and audience size.
I’ve mentioned Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel on this list many times, and that chart (pages 268-269 in the Norton paperback edition) that breaks down social complexity into tiers based on population size. I find an eerie correlation between the categories he cites and the typical behaviors of player groups in muds:
- BAND
- Up to dozens of people
- Tend not to have a fixed home
- “Egalitarian” leadership, or leader by force of will
- No real bureaucracy
- The leader doesn’t have official control of force or information
- Informal conflict resolution
- Generally unstratified culture
This looks much like the regular group of friends in a large environment, and much like a small mud. In the real world these form because of kin relationships.
- TRIBE
- Hundreds of people
- Tend to have a single home
- “Egalitarian” or “big-man”
- Organized resource extraction
- Still unstratified
This is what most guilds seem to behave like. In online my observation is that they tend to fragment fairly easily if the charismatic leader who defines the group departs (an example of this is of course the Norse Traders in “A Story About a Tree“). This is the form of social organization that we see peeping out of larger muds, and that is rampant in the MMORPGs.
- CHIEFDOM
- Thousands
- 1 or more locations
- Class issues emerge
- Centralized decision making, monarchic, cronyism
- 1 or 2 levels of bureaucracy may emerge
- Chief controls force, chief controls flow of info
- Tithing and tribute appear
- Indentured labor, slavery
- Public architecture
- Luxury goods for the elite
Welcome to the uberguild. How often do we hear stories of the indentured labor farming items that are required of newbies to the guild? Of the iron control exercised by the guild leader and the cronies that help run the thing? Of the way in which they exist in multiple games, using several as a home base? Not exactly the friendly, enlightened societies one might hope for, but currently the most highly evolved social structures available n virtual worlds.
The last one is “the state” but it takes over 50,000 people to get there, and it’s where minor stuff we tend to value (or say we do) like less cronyism, fairer distribution of wealth and of justice, rule of law, etc, starts showing up.
A key point that Diamond makes is that it’s not literal population that matters. It’s economic participation. These social structures emerge when all those people are trying to draw from the same resource well (literally trying to extract more calories from the same amount of land). So, if you’ve got a bad in-game economy (monty haul), you’re probably hurting guild development because nobody needs anybody.
Online games have a problem with inconstancy; players aren’t economic participants 24/7. When logged off, they generally are consuming resources or contributing to the economy in any significant way. And that means that social development is probably further retarded.
And that’s why Star Wars Galaxies will have the ability to buy and sell goods while offline, the ability to mine resources while offline, the ability to manufacture goods while offline, and ongoing costs to all of these things.
Eventually, the larger groups fragment into smaller groups (cf the Law about maximum community size) and each community forms its own social structures and codes.
…And then you start getting dynamics related to the conflicts between these groups, shifting alliances, etc. A lot then starts to depend on what means you have to express that conflict.
One point I used to make (and which means diddlysquat to the victims, so it wasn’t a very empathic point for me to bring up) is that speaking in these terms, there’s really no difference between the roving band of PKs and the small roleplay town. They are both subcommunities seeking to survive and perhaps expand their influence. From a group standpoint, the PKs are merely pursuing economic advancement for their group; of such things are wars made, particularly tribal wars. It’s just Mongols versus Eastern European villages, at that point, and we can easily make moral judgements about whether or not the Mongols were “in the right” all we want, but it’s still pretty much an inevitable development when there’s multiple groups competing for the same resources, each of which values its group more than the aggregate of the two groups. One will seek the eradication of the other, because frankly, small social grops like that don’t tend to be very enlightened about cultural diversity and inclusiveness (cf the post I just made to Jeff Freeman in this same thread).
Read another way, both sides are subhuman jerks to the other, mere ants to be stomped. Valuing one type of behavior or culture over another is fundamentally a value judgement. We are perfectly free to make value judgements. We should just be aware that’s what they are.
Players don’t like hearing the above. I speak from experience. 😉
We are retaining some elements of that in SWG, but it’s not nearly as direct an approach to the problem. Which is a pity, because I still think PO would have been a valuable experiment to try…
Diamond’s book is amazing. However, I would suggest a slightly different reading. I take the same passage to say that the socio-political structures will arise on their own in groups of said sizes. – Joe Andrieu
In the real world, I agree with you. But I am not sure that the same is true of the virtual. I already mentioned constancy of presence and economic participation as one example. Consider also reproduction and how the groups grow in size. in the online world, the only means is via adoption–given that cliques (which is what these tend to start as) are by their nature exclusionary, many groups simply won’t grow very quickly, whereas in the real world, a group like this will have children and keep growing year to year.
To put it another way, how do you get groups of such sizes? It’s not like guilds of 150 spring into being out of thin air. Whereas a village with sufficient food is pretty much guaranteed to get there, a player group or tribe has no growth forced upon it in that sense.
People do tend to organize. But they don’t seem to grow in size or develop into more complex structures without some prodding or need.
But I believe that, given the opportunity to participate in a higher tier structure *at no additional cost*, players will do so. At the heart of Diamond’s argument is the power of investing in “leisure” activities… the potential power of a civilization was indirectly proportional to the percentage of labor invested in sustenance. – Joe Andrieu
The trick is figuring out what sustenance is. After all, the entire premise is leisure to start with. If developing and maintaining the social structure becomes too onerous, they’ll abandon it or its development–either move on to another game, or leave it sit.
The closest analogue I can come up with to caloric extraction from the environment in these games is extraction of advancement, of experience points and quest flags and “dings.” Hence my comments recently about what we choose to reinforce and how players tend to value most those things that we provide tangible in-game recognition for. In GoP games at least, the thing that players work together to increase the efficiency of is the process of extracting more XP per hour. Hence group tactics, camping (which is essentially a direct analogue to agriculture! We used to hunter-gather the mobs, now we farm them… even the term “farming” has crept up in common usage), etc etc.
In more sophisticated economic models and crafting systems, this may transmute into gold, or from raw resources, but it’s still the same thing. As Jonathan Baron has observed many a time, the GoP games are essentially capitalist. It’s all about the benjamins, where the benjamins are the recognition we give in the form of ever-increasing numbers.
What is the leisure class in a GoP game? The people who no longer play? The people who have so much money and maxxed out levels? We do tend to see many of those people change playstyles away from achiever towards socializer or killer (eg, towards either giving up on challenges, or seeking greater challenges). But we don’t necessarily see them as contributing towards a greater social structure, perhaps because they fundamentally don’t need the plebes.
To get back to the psychological reinforcement thing–that’s also why we are heavily pursuing what we call “social professions”–activities that are not traditionally rewarded in GoP games but which we nevertheless rely heavily on for the formation of a robust culture in the game. To be very specific–even if your bartender advancement ladder isn’t particularly deep or complex, it’s still a way to recognize people who perform that function in the game. They can earn some badges to show off, they can maybe earn some money with it. They get that much-craved “ding” from the game server that validates their activity, and on top of that they are interacting with the game economy.
The logic being that if people feel validated in filling other niches in the game beyond just the experience farmer (or if they farm it in a different way) you’r more likely to get the sorts of interactions across groups that lead to greater social structure.
