Influencing Community Development

The first decision that designers must make in looking at their virtual world in terms of community is how large they want their community to be. The rule of thumb here is that beyond 250 members, a community of interest is going to fragment into sub-communities of sub-interests no matter what you do (and most fragment much sooner ¹). Most communities will be communities of interest and/or practice, with overlapping subcommunities of commitment. Very few spiritual communities will exist, and when they do they’ll be very small (just a handful of players).

If you’re looking at a large user base, therefore, the question becomes: How large do you want your basic communities of interest and practice to be?

Large communities are:

• More robust. In times of stress they can spin off smaller communities instead of shattering.

• Easier for newbies to join. They have more people out recruiting.

• More accommodating. There’s always “room for one more.”

• Fewer in number. You don’t have to provide so many interests about which they can form.

• Easier to merchandise to. Sell 50 baseball caps instead of 5.

• Easier to link to reality. People visit their web sites and attend their meets.

• More powerful. Therefore their actions are more dramatic.

• Inclusive. Socializers and achievers prefer them.

Small communities are:

• More intense. Someone who is 10% of a community has a bigger say than someone who is 1% of it.

• Quicker to develop. Fewer people make for a more streamlined passage through community levels.

• Friendlier. Newbies are treated by all members at a personal level.

• Less fractious. If a small community erupts into civil war, fewer people are caught in the crossfire.

• More diverse. The special interests are more special.

• Exclusive. Killers and explorers prefer them.

Of course, you’ll get a range of community sizes whatever you do; your influence comes in pushing the bell curve toward larger or smaller communities.

You can do this in two ways: By providing or failing to provide in-context community management tools for the players (bigger communities need more tools, therefore if you don’t give them these tools it’s harder to keep such communities coherent); by setting the natural lines of partition. In general, failing to provide tools for no reason other than you don’t want players to use them is a bad idea. Partitioning is therefore the favored approach for determining average community size.

Lines of partition vary. The most obvious (because of the way basic communication works in virtual worlds) is to use geographic partitioning. Players who are in the same communication space, with access to the same kind of resources and experiences as other people in that space, will find it easier to form communities with one another than with people in spaces that are remote. Therefore, by providing boundaries to spaces a designer can foment community within the population penned in by the space.

Examples of geographic boundaries (in decreasing strength) are

• Physical. Walls, impassable mountains.

• Resource-based. Expensive boat rides, hard-to-find single-use keys.

• Mental. Tiresome-to-cross forests and deserts.

• Relative. Your magical powers diminish as you move further from your mana source.

The most popular ² way to effect partitions is by functionality. This comes in two flavors: Those who have similar functions (mages all join the mages’ guild) and those who have complementary functions (someone to take damage, someone to cause damage, someone to repair damage). The former tends to lead to large, clearing-house communities of interest that then form sub-communities (while remaining part of the community as a whole); the latter will lead to smaller communities of commitment fairly rapidly.

In theory it’s possible to take any tangible property of a character and use it as a basis for forming a community. It’s conceivable to have communities based on character gender, character race, character strength, color of character’s hair, whether the character’s name begins with J—the list is endless. In practice, though, only character experience happens often enough to be significant: Relative newbies will often join with other relative newbies on the basis that they can’t join up with anyone else. Although mixed-ability groups are possible, providing mixed-ability content for them is awkward, so many designers prefer players to hang out with their peers anyway.

These are communities formed about in-context interests, of course. Many communities form for out-of-context reasons. There may, for example, be communities of real-life friends, of people who speak some foreign language, of fans of some TV series, or of people who share the same real-life gender ³. There is little that designers can do to stop such communities from forming, even though they can spoil immersion for non-members (and for members, too).

Partitions can be formal or informal. Formal partitions are ones that the virtual world provides itself, hardwired in. Most geographic partitioning is formal, although the weaker ones can be informal. Functional partitioning can be both. Typically, a virtual world will come with some prefabricated placeholders for communities that the designer wants or that the fiction demands. For example, all villages may be defined to have a “leader” office, the holder of which is responsible for setting local rates and deciding on what to spend the resulting income. The purpose of this role might be to give politician-type players something to shoot for, but because leaders are elected by other players ⁴ a “natural” pressure for a geographic community of interests exists. This would be a formal partition. Alternatively, a group of players may get together and become bandits, raiding plump wagon trains. They, too, will choose a leader. This would be an informal partition. The designer may have deliberately created plump wagon trains with the intention of inciting players to become bandits, but unless there’s a tangible, bandit-specific construct involved, the community of bandits is informal.

Communities made up of members with complementary functionality are generally informal, but there is often a “winning formula” that ensures they gravitate toward a common make-up. By careful composition of gameplay elements ⁵, designers can predefine roles without necessarily hardwiring them. The fighter/magic-user/cleric triple may be classic, but it’s not the only possibility even for combat (the real world’s traditional infantry/cavalry/archer triple is arguably better for gameplay purposes, as it’s more stone/paper/scissors).

The point, though, is that by engineering a need for team play at this level—whatever the roles involved–designers can encourage players to seek out members to complete their team. This means unattached players are actively sought out and brought into communities, rather than left to mope around until someone takes pity on them. Once the team is formed, the barriers go up and its members are relatively insulated from social contact with members of other teams; this usually leads to the speedy formation of a community of commitment. The approach can work spectacularly well (see EverQuest), but suffers in that not everyone wants to play as a team the whole time.

Another decision that designers need to make concerning their groups is how modular or intertwined to make them. If players can be members of more than one community, that gives them multiple possibilities for finding the one that’s right for them. More cynically, it gives them multiple reasons for not leaving. If communities are modular, the argument goes that they provide a hot-house atmosphere, with nowhere for players to go to cool down, therefore disputes come to a head and are resolved rapidly instead of brewing for weeks. Thus, they will grow to a spiritual level that much more quickly. Unfortunately, if a community is modular then it can leave a virtual world as a module if its members so decide, setting itself up in some other virtual world instead.

To entwine communities is fairly easy once you’ve made the decision to do it: You simply provide orthogonal interests that some members of a community might share but that others won’t. A player may bond most tightly to their regular party members, but also have friends in the fighters’ guild, the army, the swordsmith co-operative, the Northlands expatriates club and the glove collectors’ society. If you want to encourage some of them further, build formal hierarchies that have preconfigured cross-links (“Sorry, we only buy old swords from members of the fighters’ guild”).

To modularize communities is easier in one sense, in that it means less design work overall, but it’s quite hard to achieve in practice because of the constraints it imposes on the rest of the design of the virtual world. The DikuMUD paradigm of party roles (as exemplified by EverQuest) is one way, and the fealty hierarchy of Asheron’s Call is another. The key is to stop players from “leaking out” of their tight little groups without stifling them to the extent that they feel they’ve joined some weird mind-control cult. Unfortunately, the more variety a designer provides, the greater the urge players have to pursue disparate interests. EverQuest overcame this by having one overarching interest (kill things to get stuff so you can kill more things). Asheron’s Call attempted it by not providing mechanisms for players to organize outside the central hierarchy, but found to its cost that this caused frustration and resentment. It’s one thing to provide only carrots to eat, quite another to provide a variety of food but only let people eat the carrots.

Big communities will hold together better if they have structure. Structure will also help formal communities come into being, as it gives them a framework to flesh out. On the other hand, structured communities can’t always form in an impromptu fashion and their overt lack of equality is a barrier to achieving spiritual level. Designers realize that structure is important for communities and will often provide a number of methods by which groups can be formed, merged, and unformed, by which positions can be created and players promoted, demoted, or shifted sideward, and by which members can be admitted or expelled. Communication channels, group ownership of property and bank accounts, group-specific iconography—all these can be added to help structure. The only caveat is that it should still be possible for groups not to have structure if they don’t want it. A bunch of mages who meet in a pub and decide on the spur of the moment to go off and try to take down some trolls without a tank, just for the hell of it, don’t want to have to buy a guildhouse in order to get a private communications channel to use.

Chapter 5 discusses different ideas for formal and informal hierarchies and other social arrangements that can be used to help crystallize communities about them. For now, though, we’ll conclude our look at communities by considering ways to promote community in general.