The social side of gaming - Ducheneaut 2004

Notes from: The social side of gaming: A study of interaction patterns in an MMO, by Ducheneaut and Moore, 2004

• SWG in 2004: 400k subscribers. The game mechanics make the classes interdependent: after fighting, marksmen go to cities to be healed and buffed by medics and entertainers. Medics need materials from scouts, etc. Social interactions clearly happen in cities.
• Collect public chat events (= text + gestures such as '/bow') in the 2 places with most people on a single server. 100Mb of chat logs using the '/log' in-game command daily for a month. Used Perl to parse and MySQL to store and query events: who talks to who, how (eg /shout), and the actual text content.
• 5500 unique players. Up to 1,200 chat events per hour in a single place.
• Player interactions can be:
  • AFK macros: sending more gestures than they receive
  • Short and efficient instrumental talk: "buff plz", sending very few gestures
  • Genuine socialization, with as many gestures given as received
• Entertainers get XP when performing for someone else, and owning a high-level entertainer may be required to become a Jedi master. Hence lots of entertainers were AFK-macroing their buffs.
• Similarly, to become master in a discipline, players need to teach their skills to other apprentice-players. Hence, experts need to interact with newbies. That was also sometimes macroed.
• Problem#1: AFK macroers and live players do not cohabit well in the same places. Live players do not know what to expect.
• Solutions:
  • Different places for AFK and live players [eg Ragnarok's autotrade merchant map] - but then, the AFK players are never visited.
  • Players should be able to know, at a glance, who is available (and live) for a particular service. The existing name tag system, already indicating the player's guild and faction over players' head, could be used for that.
  • Reward live play
• Problem#2: instrumental play (for the points) uses any means to progress fast; that includes macroing. Social play is not point-based, yet 1) social interactions are measured in points, and 2) playing for points requires taking part in social activities.
• Solution: social progress should not be measured from instrumental play data (HP healed, buffs delivered, number of disciples ...), but rather from live social data (social graph ...).