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2 April, 2008
Social Compression for MMOs
Reading over my notes on Social Network Analysis, from Michael Steele's talk, it seems much of the science of creating and managing good communities revolves around social compression - constraints and structures that foster desirable behavior.
Applying these ideas to services I've already explored:
Xbox Live (my review): currently, a very basic buddy list, with game statistics. Not much of a sense of history (except externally, 360voice.com), and not much of a sense of geography. There's four areas you can play in, basically people sorting themselves by levels of competition and profanity they want in their games. But between genres of game, physical location, activity levels, Xbox Live could foster more community and exploration through visualization. Who do I end up playing with? Who plays the same games and gets the same achievements as me?
Much of the time, I end up playing Xbox Live with a number of the same friends; could the system help me visualize when those matchups happen? I could see a pattern of Thursday nights, after 9pm, for example, and begin to carve out that time for a regular meeting.
There's no way to make any kind of group, clan, alliance, friendship circle within Xbox Live. If you created those groups, perhaps that could foster a sense of meta-game. "15,000 gamer points by April 2007" group. Sort of like the spontaneous overlapping groups of Flickr, for example. This presumes that Xbox Live would like to give people incentives to form relationships.
One example Steele talked about: There's Friends Lists, what about Rivals lists? That guy always kicks my ass - I would definitely have a list of those dudes in online shooters, then I would be happy if I ever beat them.
Bang! Howdy (my review): The town is empty, until you get to the saloon. There's a static bit of town art, maybe the saloon could light up or show horses outside if a number of people were outside. Also, show signs of other players in the other areas of the game. The interface is currently very lightweight; currently it's so lightweight it doesn't give much opportunity to connect with players except in a single focused instance.
Posted by justin at February 26, 2007 9:00 AM
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