Groups

In virtual worlds, being the social beasts they are, it is imperative that players be able to form groups. The more populous the world, the more important it is that there is hard-coded support for this activity.

Chapter 3 introduced the idea of groups as the foundations of community. The point was made that people should be able to join multiple groups, so they can participate in multiple communities that are not hermetically sealed from one another; this gives players a greater sense of belonging to a virtual world (translation: They’ll find it harder to leave if they can’t take all their friends with them). When players can join only one group, that group will develop to maturity quicker but can leave as a unit; also, individuals who leave their group will often find hooking up with another group difficult, which could mean a crisis for them.

Single or multiple group membership is just one of the dimensions that can be used to describe groups. Other important ones are

• Formal or informal?

• Temporary or permanent?

• Flat or hierarchical?

• Hardwired or softwired?

Let’s take a closer look at these distinctions.

Formal or Informal?

In small-population virtual worlds, everyone knows everyone else and there is no need for formal grouping commands. If you want to create a group for whatever purpose, you chat to prospective members and there you have it, a group.

This is an informal group. The main problem is finding someone willing to do the organizing, rather than the virtual world’s lack of support for it. Informal groups arise in all virtual worlds. In small-scale ones, they’re all you need; when more players are involved, some notion of a group as a tangible entity usually surfaces.

If members of a group are to communicate on a special group channel, or are to accept mutual concessions (such as seeing one another’s basic stats or pooling experience points gained), or if the group as an entity is to possess anything (money, property), the virtual world needs to be able to reference that group. There must therefore be a formal process by which the group is created, which gives us the concept of formal groups. It is quite common for formal groups to be created from informal groups.

Note that it’s conceivable in either case for a group to have NPCs as members, although for informal groups the AI necessary to support it would be considerable.

Temporary or Permanent?

Sometimes, people want to group together for only a short period—a single session. A group of characters are hanging out at a bar, someone comes in and announces that there are wolves attacking the village, so everyone bands together to beat off the wolves. This would be a temporary group.

Groups that persist (in particular, that would continue to exist when all their members were logged off) are classified as being permanent. Even if the group has a definite aim and will cease to exist after a certain point (for example, a consortium to sell virtual pumpkins on Halloween), it counts as being permanent if it would survive as an entity were all its members to log off.

Temporary groups tend to be (but aren’t always) informal; permanent groups tend to be (but aren’t always) formal. For formal groups, there may be differences in facilities depending on whether they are temporary or permanent: It doesn’t really make sense for a temporary group to own property, for example. Although it’s possible to implement a temporary group as a permanent one, there are two principal reasons why a designer might decide not to do this:

• People are often more willing to sign up to a group on the understanding that it’s a one-off commitment than they would be if it were permanent. They might want to join a lynch mob, but not the police.

• Players may be limited to one permanent group (to help it develop quicker) but allowed to join any number of temporary groups (to assist the development of a wider sense of community).

It is important that temporary groups be quick to form and quick to disband. Players regard them as a superficial convenience, therefore anything that makes them inconvenient (even having a hard-to-remember command name) will reduce usage.

Flat or Hierarchical?

When all members of a group have the same powers as one another, that group has a fiat organization; if some members have more powers than others, it is hierarchical.

Most formal groups are at least nominally hierarchical, as they usually have a designated leader who (minimally) can expel individual members but can’t be expelled by them. In practice, though, there is a big gulf between this shallow tree structure and a full-blooded hierarchy with multiple levels, promotion, and demotion between levels, and increased powers the higher up the hierarchy you go. This degree of structure is almost always only present in formal groups, and aspects of it may be supported by the underlying code. For example, if the group has money and can own things, there may be provision for “treasury powers,” allowing a designated individual to determine who is allowed to spend the money and within what limits (that is, give a budget).

There have been many experiments in virtual worlds with customizable hierarchies, with textual worlds (as usual) at the forefront. They have the benefit, however, of relatively small and innovation-friendly populations compared with those of graphical worlds, so even poorly thought-out ideas can work well enough in practice.

For the big, graphical worlds, it’s more hit and miss. Meridian 59 had a system whereby ranks could be created within a guild, allowing extra hierarchical levels that enabled groups to restructure themselves as they grew. This was a step in the right direction, although the powers associated with the new ranks weren’t easy to fine-tune.

The bravest early attempt at building a hierarchy was made by Asheron’s Call with its allegiance system. In this, a vassal character swears allegiance to a patron character. The patron may already have other vassals (up to a dozen), and may have their own patron (hence the hierarchy). The primary tangible benefits of the relationship are that a proportion of the experience points earned by all a patron’s vassals is also passed to the patron. There also is a ranking system, whereby titles are conferred on characters the more vassals they have beneath them ¹; there are tangible benefits to a high rank, in that some magical artifacts won’t work below a certain threshold.

Asheron’s Call only allowed characters one patron (that is, they could only be in one hierarchy). It did permit them to join temporary formal groups, although in practice these were usually composed of members of the same near branch of a hierarchy. Although it’s easy to criticize AC for limiting characters to a single social group in this way, actually that wasn’t the reason its allegiance system fell short of fulfilling early hopes. The problem was, although there were tangible reasons for a character to have vassals, there were only intangible reasons for a character to be a vassal. Although intangibles can hold together vast clans in (and sometimes across) virtual worlds, AC had an unbalanced system. By trickling up experience points, it asserted that allegiance was a part of gameplay; by trickling nothing back down, it denied it.

Most people need no incentive to be the boss of other people, but they do need incentive to be bossed by them. Critical to this is the belief that they themselves may be able to rise in a hierarchy, where “rise” means “getting nearer to the top” rather than “getting further from the bottom.” AC got it the wrong way round. It was close, but no cigar.

Hardwired or Softwired?

A hardwired group is one that is programmed directly into the virtual world. A s oftwired group is one that is created by the players. All hardwired groups are permanent, and therefore they can be thought of as a subset of permanent groups. Similarly, although it’s possible to conceive of hardwired informal groups (built around predefined, labeled communication channels in the style of CB radio), in most virtual worlds that have them all hardwired groups also are formal; they can therefore be thought of as a subset of formal groups, too.

It used to be that all formal groups were hardwired into virtual worlds. Nowadays, players can set up groups themselves, of course, and virtual worlds are much the better for it. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for hardwired groups, though. What softwired groups gain in flexibility, they lose in specialization. It would, for example, be unwise to allow softwired groups to impose taxes on the inhabitants of a town; it would perhaps be acceptable, however, to allow the town council to do so. The town council is an example of a hardwired group.

Hardwired groups exist mainly for functional purposes; although social networks can benefit from having features that are coded in (for example, you can’t join the local bandits unless your horse-riding skills are sufficiently high ¹), the more practical groups tend to dominate. They’re particularly useful for newbies, because they guarantee there’s an immediate place for them in the virtual society.

Note that there is a difference between hardwired features for groups and hardwired groups. All formal groups have hardwired features (it’s what makes them formal), but these are configurable. Even if new groups can choose arbitrary values for arbitrary properties to use as entrance criteria, that would still make them softwired as the players can do something about it. Hardwired groups are fundamentally inviolate: They’re as much a part of the virtual world as the landscape and the mobiles.

One of the main advantages of hardwired groups is that it’s much easier to arrange for NPCs to join them. Few players will care to stand around bored for hours on guard duty, but (presumably) someone has to do it; NPCs fit the bill perfectly. In this respect, NPC members of a group can be thought of as resources that the player characters can control—an option not really open to other kinds of groups.

Typical hardwired hierarchies (yes, they do tend to be hierarchies) are

• Ruling/legislative. The people that make the laws. Monarchs, councilors, presidents, and so on.

• Military. The defense (or offense) forces. There may be different branches for land, sea, air, space, or whatever. Captains, sergeants, wing commanders, and so on.

• Religious. Those who concern themselves with the spiritual well-being (as they see it) of the virtual world. There may be competing religions, with different temples offering different services and worshiping different gods. Priests, mullahs, bishops, and so on.

• Judicial. My gimp takes A’s gold and B’s silver and passes it to my smith, who makes it into an electrum brooch. The judiciary sorts it out ². Judges, magistrates, lawyers, and so on.

• Guild. Craft- or service-oriented groups of people pooling resources, determining prices, offering employment. Whether these are hardwired or softwired depends largely on how the economy is run ³. Guild masters/mistresses, branch secretaries, shop stewards, and so on.

• Educational. People who teach and train. Some of these may be part of other hierarchies. Professors, drill instructors, gurus, and so on.

• Law enforcement. Those who prevent crime and apprehend criminals. This hierarchy could be part of the military in some cases. Strictly speaking, law enforcement only has to enforce the laws made by the legislator; some hierarchies may have their own law enforcers with a very specific remit (for example, the religious police). Inspectors, inquisitors, speed cops, and so on.

All formal groups have powers. The extent of these powers is mainly over the members of the group, but in the case of hardwired groups this can extend significantly to nonmembers.

Furthermore, although players can take their characters out of softwired groups and set up with someone else, this is not an option with hardwired groups.

Although some of these powers can be limited by the code, they remain highly susceptible to abuse. Judges, for example, are always working with intangibles; otherwise, the virtual world could sort out the problems itself and judges wouldn’t be needed. Low turn-out elections can be hijacked by special interest groups (for example, griefer clans), guards can be made to abandon their posts, training can be withheld or offered only to friends; the list goes on.

Because there are significant issues concerning the control of hardwired groups, community management staff should be consulted about their design. Players who have an important position in such a group are often assumed by other players to be acting with the live team’s blessing, whether or not this is indeed the case. Even if the players who hold high office are vetted for suitability first, there could still be problems: Just how long can you make a character’s jail sentence be before it amounts to permanent death? With power comes responsibility; sadly, those on the receiving end of power rarely have the same notion of “responsibility” that those wielding it do.

Common Configurations

Although there are many different ways that softwired groups can be set up, some tend to be more useful than others. Designers may therefore want to have easy-to-use templates for these in place, so that players don’t have to worry about setting flags that don’t interest them. As long as the basic models are all configurable, this is fine.

Common configurations are:

• Fellowships. Temporary groups of characters that get together for a single session then go their separate ways.

• Parties. Permanent or (more usually) casual adventuring bands. People who play together regularly.

• Clans. Large, disparate groups of characters. Although mainly a social network, individual members may come together occasionally for activities that require numbers. They’re generally too unwieldy to organize for extended periods.

• Guilds. These are like clans, but with a supporting game fiction. Some virtual worlds pursue this vision more than others: Dark Age of Camelot, for example, allows players to design their own guild crests, with the result that guilds feel more integrated into the virtual world than they otherwise might.

• Alliances. Groups of guilds or clans acting as if they were one. A single, huge alliance that completely and aggressively dominates its virtual world is known as a überguild.

Many mid-sized groups are run by politician-type players, who chivvy people into doing things and generally keep the group together. Such groups can rapidly fall apart if their leader quits or moves on. Some designers regard this as a good thing, because it allows for players to join other groups with a better chance of survival (an evolutionary argument); other designers don’t like it because any failure of community could cause players to leave (the “other groups” that players join could be in another virtual world). The latter designers will institute automated rules of succession so that groups always have leaders, and votes of confidence so that inert leaders can be replaced; the former designers won’t.