Social Factors in Virtual Worlds & Implications for SL

A fantastic piece of research from PARC that quantitatively explores social factors in World of Warcraft. Although a “game”, their conclusions strike a chord for understanding ‘open worlds’ as does the title:

“Alone Together”

Among the findings the observation that although games often seem as if they’re designed to encourage tightly knit social communities with parallels to villages, guilds, etc. that players actually fulfill roles for each other in the categories of being an:

Audience
Social presence
Spectacle.

Extrapolating WoW Social Observations to “Open Worlds” Like SL
ALthough WoW has a specific rule set, classes, levelling, etc. there are clear parallels to ‘open worlds’ like Second Life.

The ‘implicit’ rules of open worlds in which ‘levels’ are embedded in a social structure and reputation hierarchy was noted in the seminal work Designing Virtual Worlds.

1. Audience and Reputation
As the Parc article comments, worlds like WoW are “in essence reputation games”. The article compares the social interactions in WoW as being like someone playing pinball in an arcade with others gathering around to see if they can break the high score. Similarly, worlds like Second Life have implicit or explicit reputation systems based on group membership, relationship status, etc.

In SL social communities based on reputation include Gor, role play sims, etc. But in the broader non-game based settings, reputation and audience can be based on loose connections based on ‘labeled’ relationships (brother, father, wife, owner) and on wider admiration or status based on successful businesses, builds, or other factors.

The article encourages designers to not only design experiences and tools for individuals to use (or “play”) themselves, but also to “design for spectator experience”. In some ways, Second Life and ‘open environments’ are a far better venue for this than games – thus the popularity of music, group “builds”, in-world events, etc.

Relationships in SL provide ‘built in audiences’, not only of the ‘partner’ but also the social circles, relatives, pets and others that spin off of these relational nucleii.

2. Social Presence
The article notes that the feeling of being surrounded by others is a key factor to the success of worlds like WoW. It further notes that although players might be in small groups or adventuring alone, the sense of other people is provided through the large shared spaces such as Ironforge and the presence of ongoing chatter through the world and region chat channels.

In SL this is replicated primarily through small social spaces like clubs, beaches and cafes and through group chat. Having said that, group chat often seems limited because groups are often used primarily to announce events, commercial postings, and perhaps questions in technical groups such as building and scripting groups. Wide-scale social groups are rare.

Strangely, although SL is a social world, lack of “world chat” channels can severely limit the sense of being in a world with other people other than in narrow social settings. Indeed, significant time can be sent wandering or scanning the map for ‘clusters of dots’. The search, places and popular places functions don’t give a running real-time glance of where people are clustered and a lot of time can be spent bouncing from place to place looking for shared social experiences and a sense of social presence.

3. Spectacle
In the article the authors note the underlying humour to WoW as a source of spontaneous spectacle. In a creative commons like SL, spectacle can be as simple as someone setting off fireworks on a beach, changing outfits, visiting a new sim in a small group, etc. When spectacle is overtaken by grief attacks, lag, problems aggragating more than a limited number of users, and other issues, the sense of shared fun and spectacle can be dampened.