Things to Demote
Some things are generally good for communities, and some things are generally bad. There are any number of real-world reasons you wouldn’t want these anyway, but players being players they’ll sometimes occur. Designers should make every effort to prevent this from happening unless explicitly trying to make some kind of point or working with precisely controlled gameplay mechanics.
The main ones to watch out for are:
Xenophobia
Prejudice
Oppression
Xenophobia can cause an individual community to become stronger within itself, but it will be isolated from the rest of the virtual world in a way that other communities aren’t. In some virtual worlds, modular communities often have no motive to interact with other communities, but that’s quite different from having a motive not to interact with them. A party of EverQuest adventurers might keep itself to itself, but if some other party asked to team up for a while to tackle a particularly tough monster, they’d generally give the suggestion a fair hearing. A system that made it easy for the second party to slaughter members of the first party once they’d gained their trust would cause these communities to become more tightly woven (which sounds good) while treating every other community as a threat (which may also sound good, but is most certainly not). People don’t like having to be on their guard the whole time. Under this kind of pressure, modular communities will emigrate to some other virtual world where they’re not going to have to watch their back.
Prejudice is another problem, and one that is harder to deal with as it relies on real-world points of view. An adventurer might consider all socializers to be lazy cowards and a socializer might consider all adventurers to be one-dimensional primitives. Making socializers and adventurers have some mutual dependency would help if done well, but done badly it could cause resentment and make matters even worse. You have to be very careful, but it’s tractable.
When prejudice is based on the real-life attributes of players (“She’s a real girl, they’re unreliable”) there’s very little that can be done; when it’s perceived as a response to prejudice (“We don’t want your male prejudices in our group”) there’s even less. The only strategy available is to make the virtual world sufficiently engrossing and immersive that people leave their real-world prejudices behind; if they form new ones in the virtual world, well, at least your community-promoting strategies are there to address it.
Prejudice is bad because it uses the community-promoting tools to undermine community. What causes bonds can be used to break them. Communication is good, but not when what is being communicated is an ill-judged message not to communicate with someone else. Some people really are detestable, of course, and deserve their fate; prejudice metes out the same fate on those who don’t deserve it. Again, this could strengthen a community under attack, but it can provoke xenophobia while doing so and drive the community out.
Finally, oppression is not to be encouraged. Again, some idealistic designers might see it as the ideal way to fuel community. Under the heel of the despot, the players form tight, close-knit groups as they plot the revolution. Then, suddenly, they rise up as one, depose the tyrant and form a spiritual community that lasts in perpetuity.
Unfortunately, players intensely dislike being given orders by other players or having to hand over their property. The only reason they’ll put up with it for extended periods is if they figure that at some point they’ll get to have a slice of the oppressor’s power themselves. In the real world, oppressed peoples have no escape except revolution or liberation; in virtual worlds, they just go somewhere more conducive to having fun. Thus, designers should strike out anything in the virtual world that allows any player unfettered access to mechanisms by which they can make the lives of other players a misery. Always have checks and balances.