The MMO Connection

First, I'd like to apologize for my lack of updates. We've recently been shifted to new schedules at work, so I'm working overnights and find my schedule to be much less dependable at the moment. So while I'm adjusting to my new life of not worrying about the harmful effects of UV Rays, I'm also finding it hard to scheduling in blogging. But I assure you, my faithful readers, that this blog is one of my highest priorities, so I will continue to update it as often as possible, as well as with more regularity once everything normalizes for me.

So I've been thinking about the social aspects of MMO gaming. It's quite interesting, and looking into human behavior, it appears that this topic alone could be the source of books. Unfortunately, this is not a sociology blog, nor do either of us have the attention span for a post like that. What I do want to talk about though, is how can make the social aspect of our MMOs better. How can we get more people to stay online in our games?

It's not rocket surgery to understand that the more people you have playing a game, the more people you are going to appeal to. Word of mouth is the best advertising you can get, and it's a huge part of WoW's success. WoW's success grows due to its huge success. I know that sounds like a catch 22, but it makes sense. If all of your friends are doing something, you are likely going to participate in it as well. It's human nature to be social; we have an innate desire to connect with other people. When the people we are already connected to are doing something, we are likely to follow suit simply to nurture those connections. MMO games are extremely social, which is one of the major factors of their success. In addition to providing a level of entertainment to someone, you are also providing them with a social vehicle that allows them to connect and meet new people.

The connection aspect is something that I think a lot of MMO developers aren't appropriately nurturing. Players need to be able to connect and interact in order to build an attachment to the world. Developers themselves need to make decisions with this in mind. An MMO should make connecting with other players second nature; it should be fluid and easy. Look at something as simple as the chat interface; it absolutely needs to be streamlined and accessible. If it's difficult for players to communicate with each other, then they are less likely to do it. In-turn becoming isolated, and if that's what we want to give to our players, we can do this without spending millions on servers. This is why you can see wild popularity for add-ons (another topic that I'd like to dedicate a whole post to) like "WoW IM", that gives players windows for each conversation, akin to an instant messenger program.

As developers of an MMO, we need to build the game in such a way that it can fill multiple roles, one of the more important roles being "a glorified chat room". So how can we further nurture social connections and interactions beyond what we see in MMOs now? First, is that all of our social features need to be instantly understandable and accessible. This is one reason I'm a big fan of the "IM Style" system. Who doesn't understand a box with chat that has a blinking cursor at the bottom? Anyone who's playing a modern game can figure this system out in a split-second.

I haven't seen what I feel to be an acceptable attempt to facilitate player communications. Nearly all MMOs have the same formula of a chat box in the corner that is all encompassing. While this may be great for your UI, or for screen reality, it's neither efficient nor welcoming for heavy social interaction. A system like this works fine for chatting with 1 other person, or for chatting in a public room (guild/party/etc), but anything beyond that (god forbid both at the same time) and it's simply too much. Let's give our players real social tools.

Open up the world of communication to our players. How hard would it be to give players a familiar IM style in-game chat client? This system could be integrated across multiple servers or even multiple games. What if you could even piggy back it off an existing technology? I want to see an in-game client that allows me to stay connected to my real life networks from inside the game. I want to be connected to AIM and MSN while I'm in Azeroth. How about a standardized IM protocol for ALL online games?

Think about how people find friends on social networking sites like myspace or facebook. Give me the ability to build a social network in game. Let me see who my friend's friends are. Let me flip through pages of bios that people can create for their characters in-game. Give me a comments section, where my friends can post me messages. Not a clunky mail system where the only use is to send items. If our MMO games can really absorb and integrate these amazing social tools, this lets us be more connected with those around us. There are millions of people playing these games as we speak, let's connect them and give them a true MULTIPLAYER experience.

Just imagine it. A real gaming network. I want facebook for Azeroth. I want to be able to explore my fellow gamers. I want to use the information in XhunterX's profile to find out that he loves internet spades as much as I do, and use that to schedule a game with him. Then connect and play internet spades without having to disconnect my voice chat, or even leave Vana'diel. I want to be able to spend countless hours browsing profiles and looking at screenshots from peoples' digital lives while I man the shop in Courscant, all without having to leave the game. To be able to load my group's statistics on how often they die in the fire, or to have a guilds web portal available via an in-game guild profile system. Think about recruiting for your guild and saying "Hey, we're recruiting for new-dungeon-18! Looking at your profile and schedules (that you've made publicly available) it looks like you may be a good fit. Click this link to find out info about us and our guild from your in-game profile system!" The level of connections and networking we can provide people is beyond anything we've seen so far. Hell, this could even be expanded out to cell phones and portable smart devices. I want to be able to browse these sites, and keep in touch with people without having to be at the computer. I'm not saying I want to be able to play the full featured game from my phone, but I damn well want to be connected to the world and my friends, from anywhere.

If we really want our persistent online worlds to be successful, we have to model them after human behavior. This behavior has shown, time and time again, that its desire is to connect. In real life, people have a million ways to connect, especially since the inclusion of the internet. Let's help usher this forward, and allow people a huge number of ways to connect, so that THEY can pick the best for them and I assure you, people will use it. Hell, people are using our archaic connectivity tools already. Just don't forget to include the anonymous feature as well, we all need our alone time once in awhile.