That goes against the report itself.
I said you seem to be misinterpreting the report, since it’s sending mixed messages.
You’re also stuck with the idea that it’s a clinical concept of trust levels and apparently nothing else.
You see, the report isn’t about designing a way for interaction with strangers to let them remain strangers yet still somehow magically be a positive experience. The report itself advocates for the development of social bonds with increased interaction, and to prevent hostility as much as possible by increasing the tolerance levels through familiarity, consent and reciprocation loops.
No, that isn’t what it says and that isn’t what Dunbar’s Layers are about. It’s that we have those slots (the exact number is individual, the numbers are more a guideline for the average), and what fills those slots is fluid.
So for example, let’s say you have 15 best friends you always run content with. Then all of a sudden, you end up playing with 15 other casual friends more. These will then transition to become new best friends over time as the previous ones gets downgraded to good/casual. It’s the same for the casual friendships and the non-friendships, these changes all the time.
The report then mentions ways to make the surroundings of a player get upgraded in a constantly fluid way, which consequently means what filled those slots will also get downgraded as a result.
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.
It literally says a good social design is one that encourages bonding.
As for the numbers of 500-1500, that’s what the report refers to as “tribes”. These aren’t friendships, and belongs to the outer layers (i.e. weak ties). It refers to the basic shared identity, i.e. something like the homogenous server community. It’s about a player’s perception of what that community is, and if it goes too far then it overloads the amount of impressions the brain can deal with and instead filters those out as a consequence.
If anything, social networks damage our relationships. By making it possible for us to cheaply form superficial relationships (and invest our limited energy in maintaining them), such systems divert cognitive resources from smaller, intimate groups out towards larger, less-intimate groups. The result is that key relationships with best friends and loved ones suffer. And, unfortunately, it is the strength of these high-trust relationships that are most predictive of mental health and overall happiness
Naively tossing bodies at one another is not efficient social design.
Design for consent
Almost every stage of these reciprocation loops involves consent. Each party must consent to both starting, continuing, and escalating the relationship. At any point, it is totally fine for one or both parties to pull away, either to slow down or move onto some other relationship opportunity.
In the context of Dunbar’s Layers, there’s a limit on the number of people an individual can have in their lives. The process of building friendship is also the active process of curating relationships that are healthy and mutually satisfying. When players actively and enthusiastically consent to engage in your reciprocation loops, you’ll find that the relationships you build in your game are more authentic, last longer, and ultimately provide more value to your players.
Considering the constraints imposed by friendships, Dunbar’s Layers, and social groups, it is worth exploring game design that is centered around natural human social scales. Human-scale design is social design that targets the 5, 15, 50 and 150 person egocentric networks and associated groups. It explicitly avoids player systems involving 500 or more players.
If you can build a human-scale game that enables a player to spend quality time with good friends, you’ll likely improve the quality of their life. While if you break these hard limits, you actively damage your game’s social systems. These social psychology models should do more than just inform our evaluation of game systems—they should be actively shaping the way we approach design.
Such an approach focuses on smaller, more intimate social design as the core of a game. It is less concerned with big numbers and infinitely scalable systems, and more interested in fostering trust and connection between players. This perspective led us to some fundamental insights concerning how we approach online game design.
In other words, it’s not about throwing bodies together. It’s about the opposite.
That isn’t the point of the report at all. It doesn’t exclude that, sure, but it explicitly warns against making it a focus of the game’s overall design.
No, it actually refers to the reason why there is an increasing amount of portals in the game, and teleportation to places. It interferes with the immersive process of the world-building inside a player’s head, when it’s done too frequently. So a natural way to reduce such things, is to cut down on obsolute spaces.
now.