Toontown & Casablanca
This summer I decided to try my hand at a student run casual MMO Casablanca (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/itp_news_mtvU.html - http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/object/itp_news_mtvU.html). The other game I gave a try at was Toontown by Disney. Two very different games in many aspects from scale to purpose.
The gameplay of Casablanca revolves around the interaction of the Occupation versus the Resistance. The Occupation is trying to infiltrate as many of the Resistance Networks while the Resistance tries to make as large of a network as possible. It was purported to be a mobile game but it looked to just be a chat client that would txt you.
Upon first glance, it appeared that there would be a great deal of interaction between all players,where each player would be trying to discover each person's identity. From my experience it became a very slow chat room in which I would wait for the website to update. I was confused as to how one was supposed to play. With a constant chat room you could finish this game in an hour or two but with this web based client it was much slower. This made the flow of the game become tedious as once I signed off the website there was very little reason for me to log back in. It would take far too long to communicate with others and to coordinate attacks. If it was more strictly scheduled so you only had a few moves a day or hours then I would know to come back and continue my progress.
This break in the gameplay made it hard for me to want to communicate with others. In the first few hours of gameplay I tried to message specific people and talk in the primary chat rooms but the response times were so long that it became a chore to check up on and there was little reward for this. It made me wonder what types of restrictions you would want to put on a game that primarily focuses on player communication (time, length of speech, choice of words, etc.)
Toontown was a much more focused experience (to be fair Casablanca is still in Beta and wasn't made by a gigantic company). In the beginning your very words are controlled and you are given a list of various emotes to communicate with others. This is one of the most interesting parts of Toontown as they have narrowed down all communication to the basics of what an MMO player would want/need.
You are encouraged, early on, to join groups with others but also hampered by the control of how you can communicate with them (unless you add each other as friends). This makes for a limited amount of things you can convey. The interface is fairly robust and has a great deal of things that you might wish to communicate to a team member. It trivializes the communication between players and also introduces the question of how one makes friends in an MMO. Usually you party with someone enough times and if they do their job well then you might consider them a friend. The more arduous tasks you go through with that person, the closer you grow to them but all in all you are just running through a maze killing little beasts.
Both of these games made me wonder what constitutes an online relationship and what brings players together online. What levels of online relationships are there and how do they correspond with various ingame and out of game actions.