Continuing the Social Economies thread, we’ve covered the definitions and the history.  We’ll dive in to the current state for this post.  Remember that previously, I used the Facebook timeline as a watershed moment for online presence and that social economies from that point forward changed, drastically.

Outside of the gaming field, people today have extreme ease of virtual access to nearly everyone on the planet.  I talk a few times a day with friends overseas and in the US.  Talk isn’t the right word though, I typically chat with keystrokes.  And this is a big point.  Keystrokes are limiting.  They provide no audio-visual clues as to the theme of any given topic.  You can’t easily communicate feelings and emoticons are not a solution.  Many times, the keystrokes are limited in character sets, meaning that you need to summarize your idea quickly to get it across.  Otherwise you get the fun “person is typing” message that still gives me nightmares.  Today’s social interactions therefore become rapid and vapid.  More like junk food really where the context isn’t there and there’s just so much that it’s hard to digest the quality from the quantity.

Back into the gaming sphere.  Now that most (not all) have a reliable internet connection and are maintaining virtual “relationships” through web services, developers start integrating similar features into their games.  This is due mostly to the word of mouth/peer pressure dynamic of gaming, where if you’re in a solo game of CoD, other people in CoD3 don’t affect you.  However, if you want to play with your friends who have swapped games, you have to as well.  This is more or less an extension of the guild concept – which many non-MMO players call clans – a formal association with loose rulesets.  Joining a clan not only provide extrinsic rewards (mostly through perks) but also an intrinsic reward of easier difficulty.  5 coordinated people are much more efficient than 5 individuals.  MOBAs are a great example.  And that’s all fine and dandy.  You put in time, get something out and want to put in more time.

The problem stems from the size of events vs the size of the group.  Let’s say you have a 40 person event.  Each person feels valuable as a cog in the machine.  You have regular activities together.  Bonds are built.  If your group size is around 40, you’re grand.  If it’s double that, then you start getting into the clique issue of who gets to attend and who doesn’t.  The smaller the size of the event, the more segregated the group becomes.  Flex raids in WoW are a great way to combat this issue, for smaller groups.  If you’re in a 200 person guild though, what noticeable impact do you have?  You can’t effectively contribute and the withdrawals you make are barely noticeable.

I’ll talk about WoW for a few minutes now, since nearly all games since then have tried to emulate it, for better or worse.  Taking the previous paragraph into mind, WoW tiered access to a majority of the content behind group activities.  1-60 (at the time) was perfectly viable alone but at max level, you were “forced” into a group setting.  The social incentives were less than the extrinsic rewards the game offered.  Grouping had no purpose while leveling as it was time consuming and provided little to no rewards.  For it to work with the existing extrinsic rewards, you needed an “auto-summon” feature (in other games but WoW), a social framework toolkit (in-game guild tools) and stakes of claim (long term PvP goals).  If WoW was a sandbox, it wouldn’t have needed these things.

Vanilla put a lot of stress at the end game to be social, with no prior requirements or tools, and expected people to sink or swim.  Players from past MMO games (EQ, DOAC, etc…) understood these constraints and for the first year or so, while the game was small, it worked.  When the game became popular in the masses (again, the peer pressure statement + internet for all) people were joining the game only understanding the solo concept.  And then they hit the wall at 60.  With no social experience, a history of solo-only gaming, Blizzard suddenly had 75% of the playerbase in limbo.  They tried to address it a bit more in Burning Crusade, what with the significant amount of group quests while leveling but the problem was a core issue, not something to solve at level 60+.  8 years on and rather than implement social values at the start of the game, then opted to remove as much social interaction as possible.  Dungeon Finder and Looking for Raid are prime examples of this.

WoW Player Population Over Time

While not scientifically accurate (since no one surveys people about this sort of stuff) the above graph shows how the population increased overtime from Launch to Burning Crusade.  The MMO experience club never really grew and the “new to games” folks didn’t as the game wasn’t casual friendly yet.  The largest influx was from gamers who have never played an MMO.

Games from that point forward have replicated WoW’s no-grouping mentality with massive failure along the way.  WoW worked because of zeitgeist – the masses played it with nothing else around.  Every game that launched following that, without a social economy framework from day 1, has had to bolt it on after the fact and with poor results.  If the people playing the game aren’t the primary reason you’re playing the game, then it has limited shelf life.

The next post on this subject will cover the future and what options are possible.

In the previous post, I covered the definition of social economies in terms of gaming and hopefully provided some framing to the concept.  This post is going to cover the history of social economies to provide some better context as to how we got to where we are.

Believe it or not but humans require social interaction.  100 years ago, your social framework was the village.  50 years ago it was what you could phone and maybe drive to within a few hours.  20 years ago it was what you could fly to.  The Internet really only took off 15 years ago and that was through dial-up.  Broadband internet is still not common for everyone.  The ability to contact other people, over extreme distances, is really only standard for people under the age of 1.  Anyone older than that, you will have spent the majority of your social time in face to face or phone conversations.

Today, nearly everyone has easy access to some form of internet, a smart phone and free web services to keep in contact with others.  Just 7 years ago, that wasn’t the case.

I want to stress the following fact that many people seem to forget.  Facebook, arguably the largest single impact on social economies, launched to the public in 2006.  It turned a profit in 2009.  We are pretty much only 5 years into the “social media” phase.  Anything before this time was considered niche and geeky.  I consider this the watershed moment for social economies.

So back to basics.  Before MMOs we had D&D and tabletop games (like Warhammer).  These were competitive games certainly, but operated with a set of rules rather than a pre-defined path.  There was no “one right way” to run an Orc army.  This meant that strategies and discussion occurred between the players and that the actually gameplay was secondary to the social interactions.  I didn’t play D&D with strangers just to get a D&D fix.  I played with friends.

MUDs came about and for the most part were based on D&D structure, minus the grouping aspect.  They were glorified chatrooms really – like IRC in the day.  Ultima Online was the first (not really, Meridian 59 was there before) game to provide a fully interactive game with social elements.  Launched in 1997, these were the dial-up days.  A lot stunk about the game but there was freedom, lots of freedom.  Social boundaries were established quickly – PvP clans, villages, mentors, dungeon runs.  You could play alone but again since there was not destined path, people naturally got together to try new things.

Remember ICQ, MSN & AIM?  That was the Facebook of the day.  Ventrilo, Mumble and Skype all came later.  General chat channels didn’t exist until EQ.  PHPBB was making thousands on guild websites.  If you wanted to talk to someone, you did it on the web, not in-game.  This also meant that the social bonds you made were available in other games and at times where you were not playing at all.  You didn’t need to play EQ to keep in touch with your UO friends.

If you look back before 2006, contact with people not in physical proximity was technically challenging: you needed hard to find quality internet, a desktop application (or website forum), non-game related contact information and good typing skills.  This “barrier to entry” meant that those who were in the game, wanted to be in the game and had a vested interest.  They wanted to participate in the social economy of the day and made the non-negligible effort to get there.  Up until 2006, there was common ground to build on.