Sustainable, scalable social engagement: a quick primer on online game ecosystems
I often find myself in the (stimulating, interesting) position of explaining how online games work to people from other fields. I realized recently that I’ve been doing this for quite a long time, but most notably for the last eleven (!) years since I transitioned formally into working on games for education, then for research and development, and now for the advancement of machine learning techniques.
Most people are familiar with video games from a kind of distant view — either they play them or they have observed other people playing them. (At this point I rarely encounter anyone with zero familiarity, especially with the relatively recent ubiquity of mobile phones.) But games are a big field, and these reference points can be incredibly diverse, especially across time: one might remember playing (or being exposed to) arcade games in the 80s, Minesweeper in the 90s, Facebook games in 2010, or console shooter games today. All of these, though commonly called up as “video games”, are radically different experiences that are not, for the most part, comparable in terms of the delivered human experience.
None of the formats I mentioned include massively multiplayer online (MMO) games — a format receiving more attention in recent months due to a resurgence of the thirty year old concept of the metaverse (shh). These games are where I come from — more on that later! I trace my lineage in games from text-based multiplayer games in the late 90s — these games in particular refer to themselves as the first MMOs — through virtual worlds in the next decade, to social games in the decade after and mobile social after that. Across this arc of game history within this particular (very unique!) branch we saw the definition of “massive” scale from 1000s (the first game I worked on, DragonRealms, boasted 2,000 concurrent players, which was screamingly large for its time, demanding new web technologies) to 10,000s (Everquest in its heyday is estimated to have run about 22,000 daily players against a subscription base of approximately 1m) to 100,000s and finally millions with the rise of social games.
Wall Street increasingly took notice of this growth because revenue, of course, grew with it; I launched a feature when I was on the live team at Frontierville that produced a $2m day. This was a dizzying development and many of the developers I know are still reeling from it today. But from a game design perspective, what this also did was radically change game design itself — the kind of designer who gets a kick out of million-concurrent games is quite a different designer from the one who likes to work in the 100k range, the 1000 range, or the sub-1000 range. Mechanics that work at each of these strata vary wildly, as does the designer’s relationship with the playerbase.
I say all of this to underline that in this post I am specifically applying learnings from: 1) “massive” class online games at the 100k concurrency tier, which implies 2) synchronous and asynchronous high-touch player interaction (simultaneous, immersive play). Interestingly, this scale seems to be the sweet spot for sustainable and scalable social engagement. It might scale bigger, but I would argue that if it does, we haven’t figured that out yet. Social games (1m+ concurrent) hacked their way through this by making the play very light touch — not immersive (requiring full attention, absorbing all senses), and often asynchronous.
Sustainable Massive-Scale Engagement Patterns
So! In this game class, in which you have phenomenally sticky player behavior (dedication often measured in years of engagement) and deep interpersonal interaction (my benchmark for this is: did your game cause anyone to get married in real life?), there are some common engagement patterns that enable sustainable, rich social interaction.
We can think about these macro-patterns as:
roles (professions): identities that create instantaneous clear group purpose;
groups (guilds): organized ways of grouping like-minded people;
grinds: repeatable tasks that act as calls to action; and
contests: tests of skill that relate like-roled people to each other.
The interaction of these elements creates an engine of engagement that can reach self-sustaining function. Groups proactively recruit new members, and give purpose to long-time members; grinds give participants something to do while waiting for others to log in, and to show their dedication to the world; contests, always optional, give players a way of demonstrating competence and attaining skill-based fame.
There’s so much more! Let’s dive in.
1: Roles
A role, often referred to as a “profession” or “class” (or sometimes, confusingly, a “guild”) in an online game, is a specific job. When a player first drops into a game, they are often in a kind of “tourist” default state, explicitly un-initiated, and they are presented with a significant choice: which role will they take? The degree to which the game focuses on initiation relates to its community integrity: more sustainable, stickier games will emphasize initiation, where less sticky games might just throw the choice in front of the player on an avatar creation screen.
We know from psychology studies that purpose has a tremendous positive effect on human flourishing. Dr. Anthony Burrow, interviewed for Hidden Brain in that link, has conducted studies demonstrating the powerful insulating effect of purpose on resilience and resisting outside influences not just on adults, but on adolescents as well.
Roles in MMOs, archetypal examples which are as simple as “paladin”, “healer”, “magician”, provide instant purpose. One’s role in the community is instantly clear, as is what one must do. One instantly attains affinity with others in addition to that relationship to society (your role plus your level). Games that facilitate mentorship also typically connect novitiates in a role or profession to elders in that role — a magical combination that provides purpose to the elder and initiation to the novice.
There has been a fair bit of experimentation in alternate role structures, but one reason why fantasy games are so thematically persistent in online worlds is because of the elegant orthogonality of their roles. We owe this, perhaps, to J. R. R. Tolkien, who was an underrated game designer.
Key questions
When crafting roles for a world, consider:
What’s your magic number?
Consider the differences between a world with five roles and a world with twelve. How do you want it to feel? How much affinity do you want individuals to have with their role? (Smaller # of roles = less intra-role affinity.)
Is it a permanent choice?
Role-switching is a venerable debate in the online game space. Do you let players change their mind? Do they have to completely abandon their progress if they do so?
How can a single player having a series of roles across their ‘lifetime’ facilitate the story the player tells themselves about the character?
Related to this is the equally hot-button topic of dual classing. Can they only have one role, or can they have more than one? How is this accomplished? How easy is it?
How exclusive is role-restricted content?
The percentage of role-restricted space you give will make a big difference on game feel. Larger games tend to have very little role-restricted space — say 1%. A very roleplay-heavy game will have a much higher percentage of role-restricted space.
A role is a kind of group. How will the roles govern themselves?
How will you facilitate leadership, conflict resolution, mentorship, and ritual — all that good group stuff — within the role identity?
2. Groups
A group, more commonly called a “guild” in an online game, is a structure containing people that is maintained by specifically-appointed leadership.
Important group infrastructure involves things like:
adding someone to the group
removing someone from the group
changing the leadership status of a member of the group
editing official group documents
making announcements
Groups provide a number of very important things to the ecosystem: leadership — a clear structure for decision-making regarding key group functions, such as initiation or expulsion; affinity — feelings of belonging generated purely through membership, which is presumed to be based on common interests or values; loyalty — a ; and group identity — a self that is bigger (and therefore more powerful) than the individual.
Roles provide affinity connections that are mechanistic in nature — they’re expressive and they’re easy, but they’re (usually) not very deep. Groups allow players to form connections based — ideally — on shared values. In fantasy games this is often expressed as a “motto” (as popularized by George R. R. Martin in Game of Thrones): we know something about the values and personality of House Follard whose words are “None so Wise” in comparison to House Targaryen’s “Fire and Blood”.
A given player’s sense of belonging, given a structure that has both roles and groups, therefore, will come more from the group than it does from the role. Roles act as early catalysts to give players introductions to the world, but as they grow invested, groups provide this next stratus layer of engagement, both demanding and creating deeper engagement. Deep personal connections frequently form between members of a group, often resulting in transference of growth, identity, and connection outside the game.
Key questions
When crafting group tools for a world, consider:
How big can the groups get?
If you’re not an engineer, an engineer will at some point ask you how big the groups can get. Dunbar would suggest capping at 150 — but a lot of big game guilds get much larger than this. Keeping the number very small (say 25 — a limit in earlier games) will give your game a radically different feel as well.
How much will it cost a player?
The commitment you require from a player before they can join a group makes a significant impact on social dynamics. Remember: easy isn’t always better!
What is your intended form of group governance?
This can become quite a deep human question! Do you favor the simplicity of authoritarianism or the resiliency of democracy? Something in between? Your design decisions will facilitate one more than the other.
How do you think about events and pageantry?
In circles of belonging, a little bit of flair goes a long way. How will you facilitate players’ ability to gather together, celebrate significant moments, or put on a show?
In regional gathering points, such as festivals, what role do groups play?
How can you facilitate information exchange?
We think about leadership being about power from the outside, but a surprising amount of it is actually about information organization — what gets communicated to whom, when?
Effective groups engage in their own external information organization, with elaborate websites, spreadsheets, mailing lists. You probably can’t out-compete this — but it’s worth a think, eh?
How will groups interface with each other?
This is a biggie. In many online games, the answer to this is pretty simple: they fight. Or they climb leaderboards. And this is… fine. But the rich stuff is, as always, in the edgy nuance space.
Can groups express values?
Can similar groups discover each other?
Can groups express inter-group affinity? (Even forming larger super-groups?)
Can groups resolve conflict other than with combat?
How will groups navigate internal conflict?
This is an extension of the governance question, but there are often recognizable patterns in the dissolution of online groups. What tools can you give your community to navigate these waters?
How will you know who your best leaders are?
You’ll have coarse data, sure (who has the biggest group…). But how might you instrument, or provide affordances for, the expression of quality in leadership? Because I promise — you’re gonna want to know.
3. Grinds
The word “grind” has a fraught and contentious history in MMO development history. Someone else can chart this more detailed history, but my sense is that grinds — that is, repetitive behaviors yielding very small increments of skill progress — happened sort of by accident in the early online games. Basic mechanics such as killing low-level monsters (famously rats, for instance), foraging for junk objects, or crafting simple items, started out as mechanics intended to produce a certain game effect. For example, if your game is going to involve killing monsters, you have to start somewhere with a level one character, which implies something like a rat — and you don’t necessarily anticipate ahead of time that some players may want to kill thousands and thousands of rats in a kind of incredibly slow, low-stress clicking activity.
The accidental grind evolved into kind of a panicked one: we had a lot of players and they needed something — anything — to do. They consumed all the game content and demanded more far faster than we could generate it, back when content was hard and slow to create (and when, to be honest, our standards for content were higher). So — more rats! First you needed 10 rats to get to level 2 — now you need 100! Done! One integer equaling hundreds of hours of gameplay.
Then things got a bit more sophisticated. Quests came on the scene — still the same game task, but now with a wrapper of character dialogue directing you to do that task. And then the explosion of quest ramifications, including the daily quest — what if there was a quest you could do only once a day? Bam! We’ll show those grinders! You have to come back every day! And you have to do it a hundred times to get this pet gerbil!
You can see how “grind” might develop a nasty reputation.
But there’s a deeper purpose to a repetitive task. Even in those earliest games, the grind served an important but indirect purpose: it created a context for socializing. It was a way to always be doing something that was easy to invite someone else along to do. Later grinds, grasped by designers out of desperation, abused this, but they wouldn’t have been able to do so had it not served this basic function. Where grinding went awry was when it genuinely became work whose only purpose was to attain a higher number, and because it was work for a number, one often got stuck doing it alone.
Online games without core simple behaviors that can be repeated for incremental progress die. We can rail against the ‘grind’ all we want — but had better be okay railing equally at watching football, knitting, card games, or any of the myriad other non-productive repetitive activities human beings engage in primarily for the sake of secondary socialization. Primary socialization is too much work. “Want to go kill some rats?” is vastly simpler, requires less vulnerability, and gives us a veneer of purpose.
Key questions
To grind well, think about:
What is the extremely simple core behavior that will provide the repeatable loop of your experience?
Does performing that behavior reflect your creative goals for the experience? What feeling does that behavior produce? Is that how you want most of your experience to feel?
Can I do it while making dinner? If I can’t, it’s probably too complicated.
How will the outputs of this behavior change at major thresholds of performance? When I’ve done it 1,000 times? 10,000? 100,000?
4. Contests
You can hold together a multiplayer experience without any form of contest, but it’s very difficult to do at scale. This contest need not be combative or even zero sum (one winner, one loser) — one of the most brilliant and unique massively multiplayer games of all time, A Tale in the Desert, was fundamentally centered around a contest even though there was no combat whatsoever.
Contests give players a clear way of measuring the results of their investments, and the skills and/or strategies they’ve obtained through the experience. This is a form of expression that connects to a player’s sense of purpose — but a special kind of purpose that changes over time. Contests keep things interesting.
Not all players will want to participate in contests. But even the ones who don’t will generally enjoy observing them. Contests also create highly engaging events that bring communities together, especially if there is a long arc of progression leading up to a major contest (a once-a-year contest-of-contests like playoffs leading to a championship).
