Dunbar's Layers And Mmo Design-Kim
#notesFromPaper, #killerPaper Year : Tags : online community building MMOs Authors: Kim Cook Cartwright Hughes
MMO design should work around how friendships are formed, aka they should involve reciprocity.
Give players the ability to invest a little into each other, to respond, and to acknowledge and thank each other.
- create shared goals and examples of how to work together towards those goals
- create public and private spaces
- abuse tribalism, pit groups against each other.
- make your game a positive refuge from things.
Leadership: Context specific leaders, cults of personality, symbolic leaders (shared cultural values embodied by a person)
Add tools for reputation and status signaling.
Don’t start with a big world where players constantly interact with strangers.
Define social activities with different trust levels / group sizes. Build relevant support networks. Allow activities to scale so players can jump from solo (low dependency, low trust) stuff to higher trust, larger group activities.
FB games are badly socially designed: Sending out an invite is easy, but playing is hard. Since all friends are at the same level, it ignores Dunbar’s layers and allows social dilution since there aren’t real bonds.
Don’t mix up different types of socializing. If you say “this is a 16 person raid”, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these people are all friends
page 21 has some awesome calculations on what kind of activities you should do for different players who play the game different amounts of time.
Don’t just mash people together
