Virtual Worlds as…Virtual Worlds

I set out in this chapter to examine how researchers in various fields view virtual worlds. I feel I ought to end, however, with a reminder for virtual world designers that there is very relevant work going on much closer to home.

Community Management

Sooner or later, community management ¹ is going to become a social science in its own right if it isn’t one already. Virtual world designers create virtual worlds, but it’s the live team that keeps them going. Designers should therefore take this into account when they create worlds in the first place. Of course, as I’ve been mentioning throughout this book, designers do pay serious attention to the way that the virtual world will be run; unless they have live-team experience (which the best of them do, of course), their views may, however, be somewhat idealized. As a designer, ask yourself if you would know what to do if:

• A confused player asked for help.

• A player whose character was stuck in a pit asked to be extracted.

• Either of the preceding occurred involving the same player for the third time in 30 minutes.

• Two players were arguing about ownership of loot.

• A grief player who doesn’t think they are a grief player used earlier anti-grief pronouncements of yours to cause grief.

• A concerned relative of a player got in touch asking about addiction.

These are just some of the kinds of things that customer relations staff have to handle routinely.

When a virtual world goes live it becomes part of the real world. In the real world, things happen that the designer can’t control:

• Players multi-line—that is, play more than one character simultaneously. This can be a big problem for small-scale virtual worlds.

• Players divert risk. They will do anything dangerous with a character they don’t care about, then hand the benefits (treasure, and so on) over to one they do care about.

• Players collude. They form large gangs, and create their own agendas that may be at odds with those of other players.

• Players play the system. If they know you have an attitude of “the customer is always right,” they will milk it dry.

• Players communicate outside of the virtual world. This puts them at an advantage over ones that have to communicate within the virtual world where they can be overheard. Carefully synchronized diversionary tactics to occupy administrative staff while a bug is exploited are not unprecedented.

• Players use bots and macros to automate functionality to the detriment of other players.

Community management staff need out-of-context tools so they can spot these problems and implement any decisions they make as a result. If the design can help, so much the better.

There’s a governmental issue here. If the community management team wants something in the virtual world, does the designer have to put it in or can they say no? There are dangers in both approaches: Big-budget commercial virtual worlds have failed to materialize because designers wouldn’t compromise their designs to account for community management concerns, and others have collapsed in a heap because their designers did. It’s my belief ² that in the end, the designer must be in overall charge—but that only a foolish designer would ignore the community management team’s input.

Without community management experience to draw on, the following writings are the next-best thing:

• Daniel Pargman, 2000 ³. This is Pargman’s Ph.D. thesis, which examines the administration of the textual world SvenskMUD over a period of three and a half years. It is amazingly detailed and full of insight; every professional virtual world designer should have a copy, even though it is somewhat obscure.

• John Suler, ongoing ⁴. Psychologist Suler explains who misbehaves in virtual worlds, why they misbehave, and (most incredibly usefully) how to manage their behavior. It’s as simple as that.

• Jonas Heide Smith, 2002 ⁵. This MA thesis describes the design features that virtual worlds should incorporate if they are to promote co-operation among their players, rather than conflict. It has some very good explanations of well-known ⁶ viewpoints about behavior, as they apply to virtual worlds.