Again with that problem, kemurai… You’re still only thinking about the individual, while remaining oblivious to the wider consequences.
Ok, so to break this down, automated matchmaking can be relatively toxic-free. It can. But it requires certain conditions to be met to steer clear of breeding toxic outbursts.
https://www.projecthorseshoe.com/reports/featured/ph18r8.htm goes over exactly what’s needed for automated matchmaking to function. But a simple summary is that it requires simpler content matching the lack of subconscious social mechanisms in such a design.
And I literally mean content even babies can play without being punished in a meaningful way for it. It can’t be any form of challenging whatsoever, other than requiring time. (Retail rings a bell, anyone?)
Anyway, so what it did was enable this anonymous wasteland where nobody talks to build its roots in the habits of players, and if they do talk there’s an abnormally high risk of it being because of toxic outbursts.
So what the actions of simply saying “hello, can I …?” or “hello, I’m a night elf XXXXX lvl YY, can I join?” gives room for is a subconscious mechanism in all our brains, where we mentally accept the person we’re inviting, and we have control over which group we might want to join.
This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s the very foundation of how we grow socially in a game like this.
Which means when you turn this off more and more, you eventually end up in a social landscape like retail, where many treats other players as exchangeable tools, kinda like bots. No reason to remember anyone. No reason to bond with anyone.
As the report itself states:
Many game designers assume that if there is a shared reward, people will naturally align their activities. This might work if humans were hyper-rational, profit-maximizing automatons, but they are not.
The big idea
Key discoveries in social psychology place hard limits on the types of social games we can build.
- Friendship research shows meaningful in-game relationships require conditions such as proximity, similarity, reciprocity, and disclosure
- Dunbar’s Layers research shows that players have hard limits on the number of meaningful relationships in their life. These friendship are organized into layers of increasing size and decreasing intimacy.
- Social group research shows the need for increasingly complex support structure as group size grows
These are the physics that social designers must understand and build into their designs.
The trap
Many past designs ignored Dunbar’s Layers and naively assumed “more is better.” They ignore friendship formation and assume “it just happens.” They ignore social groups and arbitrarily mash players together.
In reality, these assumptions are actively harmful and cause the following:
- Fewer in-game friendships . A flood of strangers swamp the reciprocation and proximity mechanisms that generate friends. Poor identity, persistence, reciprocity, and consent systems mean these strangers never convert into friends, so there are fewer meaningful relationships in the game.
- Increased toxicity . Large groups of strangers naturally breed toxic sub-groups. Players engage in violent rejection of out-groups in order to protect their experience and intergroup conflict becomes the cultural norm. Such communities are hard to reform and poison long-term retention.
- Scope creep . The additional systems necessary to manage large groups of strangers substantially increase the scope of your game.
What players need
If players have not filled all the slots in their primary friend network, they suffer. And, in response, they are intrinsically motivated to deepen their existing relationships or build relationships with new people. Striving for belongingness is one of the strongest human motivations. They will naturally seek out activities that help them make friends and belong to something bigger than themselves.
The opportunity
If your games help build relationships for the player in any of their inner layers, you’ll accomplish a couple key benefits:
- Increase retention and engagement . Your game becomes the place where people attain their desires. Since you provide immense value, they make the game a key part of their lives.
- Improve the lives of your players . They’ll experience less depression, better health, and have more robustness in the face of negative life events.
Best practices
If we take all the insights gleaned from research into group psychology, examples from online game design, examination of Dunbar’s Layers and social motivation—all of it into consideration, we can arrive at several, strong best practices:
- Build games for smaller cohorts . The base activities should target small, collaborative groups. Large groups of close friends are rare or, in many cases, mathematically impossible.
- Cluster players into persistent, high-density cohorts . So they have repeat interactions with the same players. The more reciprocation loops that are completed, the stronger the friendships. Big, empty spaces are not a positive feature.
- Encourage high-concurrency events or asynchronous activities . Logistics favor players being around to interact with their friends. Having friends playing the same game doesn’t matter if you never see them.
- Aim for long-term engagement . Build a game where players are engaged for hundreds of hours, so they have enough time to build deeper friendships. It takes at least 50 hours of interactions to form a basic friendship.
- Attract existing friends, if possible . Existing friends from the strongest foundation for your game community, especially when first launching your game. Put people into safe, guild-like structures and encourage them to bring in their friends.
- Design for climbing the trust spectrum . When introducing strangers into your game, build low-trust activities that scale into high-trust activities. Start with parallel or single-player gameplay and allow players to opt-in to higher-dependency activities. If players start forming strong friendships in game, support them. Bring those relationships into safe places with tools for enabling consent, support, and disclosure.
Weak ties are not universally good for game developers.
- Scope creep . The economic and political systems necessary to make very large groups function are often some of the most complex features in a game. To support weak ties in your game is to accept a certain level of scope creep.
- Over emphasis on weak ties can hurt strong ties . Weak ties are also not a replacement for strong ties. Social groups involving mostly weak ties are poor at providing emotional support as well as transferring and enforcing group norms. Many critiques of strongly capitalist, technocratic or libertarian dystopias center on how a overreliance on weak ties (via large-scale trade, algorithmic replacement of reciprocation loops, and other scaleable-yet-dehumanized systems) leads to an accidental erosion of strong ties.
If anything, modern MMOs suffer from too many weak ties and not enough emphasis on building and supporting strong ties. Perhaps because MUDs and early online games were historically rich with strong bonds, MMO designers simply assumed they’d get those for free. They didn’t realize their desire to build a big game—which historically has been conflated with popularity—was antithetical to the magical social connections that made early online games attractive in the first place.
PS:
Group vs. group content . Conflict with other groups is a common method of providing a shared purpose. Meaningful rivalries can play out over the course of months or years. Games with PvP content can create very rich social histories if they can operate at this scale.
Then also read Old battlegroups compared to now
and then compare it to the xrealm matchmaking garbage in Classic.
It’s important to be able to grow rivalries with others. It affects our desire to win, our way of thinking and how motivated we feel in order to accomplish it.
Which means we need to be able to remember and recognize the people we try to win against.