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Human behavior and why force grouping doesn't work
jpnz
Member Posts: 3,529
I wish to shift the focus a bit and move away from 'game design' which is the stickied 'Solo vs group' thread.
From a RL point of view, humans generally don't talk to strangers with no reason. Despite the advancement in technology of 'contact me anywhere', rarely do we see humans just walk up to someone and talk to them.
If we do it is because we want something from the interaction; I talk to cafe lady who wants my money and I need my caffine shot.
Humans want to be in the presence of other people but not actually interact with all of them. I go to bars with my friends and hang out with my friends. I don't go to bars and talk to someone I don't know; unless its staff and my orange juice is 30 seconds late.
Exception is if I am there with a specific focus on 'talking to strangers' like 'Singles Bar / Speed dating' but even then, there is that desire to get something (companionship) out of it.
Forced grouping in MMOs? Fine. Cool. Have at it.
But looking at how most people (maybe its because I lived in large cities most of my life?) live, don't expect a massive amount of people.
I've made sweaping generalization which won't apply 100% (Yes that ONE poster who's like 'but I talk to EVERYONE! ^__^ ) but that's how I view why forced grouping won't be popular. Pretty sure a professional in social / behavioural science can poke holes in my theory though. :P
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Comments
When MMO's 'forced' you to group,there was something to get out of it..
better exp on a much harder leveling scale.
and phat lewtz that were much more rare and elusive than todays iterations.
Totally disagree. And I think you'll find that the bulk of psychological and anthropological literatue does as well.
People talk to random strangers all the time, in line at the bank, the grocery store, gas stations...
We are social creatures, not just because it was important to survive but for a lot of emotional reasons. Removing contact whether it is social, physical... can actually contribute cause a great deal of psychological conditions not the least of which is depression.
However you are right that forced grouping does not work. People want to socialize with others because they like to be social.
What the developers of these games have to answer is, "Why are people playing these games?" I doubt the answer is to be social for the majority of people. They will socialize in their RL.
They play games for entertainment.
edit - in todays world it only seems like people don't socialize unless there is a reason for because we are totally overstimulated and constantly bombarded by social media. You literally cannot go for an hour without phone, text, computer, television, radio, ads, friends.... hitting you in some way. Time to escape to the bush I think.
Seemed to work well enough for EQ and FFXI.
Or I guess in games like DAoC and Eve where grouping isn't necessarily required, but the best possible experience comes from doing so.
It's true the MMO playerbase has changed since then though.
I think it was just the player base molding to the trend..
WoW for the most part made it possible to solo from 1 to max level.With WoW's success other companies followed suit,thus you see what we see today..
Casual,accessable,solo friendly themeparks.
If a hit MMO were to release where you would greatly benefit from grouping,then I think people would mold to that idea,just like they did in the early days of the MMO's existance.
You know, this post totally headshots my thread.
*Shake fists*
I'd love to know where you live since in my area, people don't talk much. At least not without an 'excuse' to do so.
Other than 'Hi / good evening' I rarely see random strangers talk. Maybe its just me?
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
School is true force grouping. You had no choice on who to be with, but you were there day in and day out and there were some you grew bonds with, and some you also disliked.
Sports is another sort of human grouping, you play for fun, you work together, and you get to know one another.
At work you will also end up making groups, or in fact your boss does, and you will interact. At work hours because you have to, during coffee breaks because its boring to sit in silence.
When I go to a sports game with 5k I talk with the people I knew from before.
Since you mentioned living in a city and how people don't really interact, when people live in small villages with fewer people they will interact, in big cities they wont. Its easy getting to know 100 people, and you will bump into them all the time, if you are 100k you wont interact. Quite often you wont even talk with the neighbours.
Raid guilds is very similar to how you interact in sports, except you do it from far apart. Guilds will make people interact, unless people don't want to interact at all. When it comes to game servers its a lot harder to get close interaction, just too many people.
Vancouver BC.
And weirdly or maybe ironically enough despite my firm belief in what I said. There was a poll here done recently that showed that a lot of people were actually pretty lonely. It was hard to make friends...
http://www.straight.com/article-713841/vancouver/vancouver-study-city-loneliness-and-unfriendliness
What were those?
UO and EQ (about 1/3 of the classes in EQ could) you could and did solo quite well. And WoW is now getting up there.
I compare forced grouping mechanics in games to be like being forced to write those book reports in school on the classics. Some of them are great books, but when they are being rammed down your throat and you are expected to try and dissect them and find some hidden meanings or symbolism or other bullshit that might not even really be there, it makes them hard to enjoy. Going back and re-reading them later in life you will find that many are actually just enjoyable stories.
Just make content enjoyable and rewarding and people will group up natually. This worked great in Asheron's Call, haven't seen anything similar since.
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster
It's human behavior to want to choose when and where to be social and not have it crammed down your throat. Games should work much the same way.
Or working on cars
I like working on cars and building things. However when there is something wrong with the car and it needs to be done, it is no longer fun.
Yeah, city people have psychological problems like you described. For people that don't live in some boxes place one after another, one next to each other bonding is natural and it's because we always lived in packs.
Let me explain you this way. My friend live in the city HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I met him when i was working with his company and for some reason we keept contact. Anyway - I was very suprised that he have no idea who live next to his door in housing (that you call it in english) ? It's really just a psychological problem. Why ?
I know everyone in my block (when I moved because of my job and I'm trying to buy a house). Next thing I did after moved in was to bring cake every day and visit every one of them to say "Hi!", drop cake and tell them they can visit if they want when they want.
It was common thing for me. I lived in the village in my early years. It was natural that at the age of 12 I was basically knew all people there by face and by name. At the age of 16-18 I was knew many people who live nerby our village. It was good thing because if you ever had a problem you could always ask for help and someone always helped you. At the age of 20 I could not move 10m without saying Hi to someone (even cops - people really knew each other back there).
Anyway... what you described is your psychological problem and instead of telling us that you are all fine and people are strange because they want to form groups and help each other (like we were doing since stone age) - visit psychiatrist. Maybe he can help you.
It's not only your problem. I once saw experiment when actor collapsed in the middle of the city. No one helped him.
Except in games if you want to simulate human interaction...
We're forced in our day to day lives to interact with people all the time. Sometimes this leads to social encounters. Some people need the incentive or the push.
MMOs would work in the same way. They'd set up the potential for a social exchange and leave it to you to take it further.
Modern MMOs just make you 100% self sufficient, which means no socializing or social community ever develops. And without a community holding people to games, they peter out and die very quickly (see every WoW clone).
Remember OP, this is through your perspective only. This does not apply to all "human behavior". For me personally, I enjoy a chat with a stranger. There is something to learn from everyone, so why not talk to your fellow peers. We're all a part of this thing called life anyways. No need for a professional in social/ behavioral sciences to come disprove. It's called Love
That because you probably live in a city where no one care about other (typical way these days), yes that a problem but that not the human nature. Humans are social creature, do you think the world you know is build by a soloer? No friend, the only way for a human to accomplish things is with another human. How do you make babys? How do you build wonders? How do you create things?
No humans can live alone but almost all of them will deny they need other people to live or help them... that pride at the highest.... Yeah mankind is a pround race but a stupid race.....
Might have something there, city people vs villagers, i live in a fairly small village in the middle of nowhere, and people are generally very friendly, i doubt its because we're in the countryside though, it might just be that increased population density increases personal isolation, or at least the feeling of personal isolation. In the UK at least children too are encouraged 'not to talk to strangers' until pretty much anyone who is outside of the family circle is treated with a certain amount of suspicion, and unfortunately, this is sometimes not without good reason, hardly a week goes by without hearing of a child being snatched etc. You would think that in a game at least, people would feel able to socialise more, your example of the actor, sadly is one i have seen, and i couldnt believe it, but its true, people don't want to get involved, its like they travel around in their own little 'bubble'. Perhaps its not quite so strange that people tend to play solo after all.. though personally i'll still take the more social game over the less social game, warts and all
Games are first and foremost recreational. The word 'forced' rings badly with that. That's exactly why we don't want to be 'forced' when we get home from work and want to relax. Your whole premisis of why games "die" is wrong too. It has very little to do with lack of social interaction. If that were the case then WoW would never have been popular to begin with. That was really the game that got that ball rolling.
Lets not forget that "we" the gamers has pushed the genre in the direction it is in and not the developers. They only follow where the money is. Again the failures have little to do with what we are discussing.
Its not really a psychological issue as youre making it out to be, but more of a situational / environmental one. You used the example of getting to know your neighbors in the immediate area, but thats just a few people. Its highly unlikely you went around the entire city and got to know everyone in your city though.
Its kind of like the whole small country town vs big city thing. In smaller towns where there are just a few hundred / thousand people living, everyone kind of knows eachother or at least knows of eachother through their community. But in a city with a million or more people in it most people only ever get to know a very very small % of the population. Sure youll see everyone walking / driving around but you have no idea who they are, what their names are, what theyre like, etc. Theyre just random people who you have nothing to do with it.
Thats kind of what happened with MMOs. A decade + ago MMOs werent so mainstream and the populations on the few games we had at the time were smaller and the communities more tight knit. Kind of like the small country towns. You usually only had a few hundred / thousand people on a game and people kind of naturally got to know eachother because there was so few. You would see much fewer people running around, talking in chat, etc and you came to recognize those same people whenever you saw them. But in MMOs of today where the populations are generally larger, especially when a game 1st launches, there are just too many people to get to know. You might recognize some of the more vocal people in chat, or some of the people who youve grouped up with along the way because youre progressing around the same rate, but there are thousands of others on your server who youll never even run into because theyre doing different things and chatting amongst their own friend / guilds.
This also kind of ties in with death as well. If someone dies in a smaller community, usually everyone is aware of it, and chances are it was someone they knew and they experience some form of loss. Meanwhile in major cities people die every day and the majority of the city is completely unaware of it happening except for that persons own immediate friends and family. Similarly in an MMO if someone leaves the game (in a sense "dying" and no longer exisiting in that world) most peope nowadays are completely unaware of that individual leaving except for his ow guild / friends. A decade ago, people who had been playing for a long time leaving a game was a much bigger deal because they made up a bigger portion of the community and had ties with a larger % of the players.
Its really all about scope / perspective. Back when people believed that our planet was everything, or it was the center of the universe, the thought of our planet being destroyed was the end of existence. But now we know that we are a very very very tiny speck in the scope of the entire universe and while our planet being destroyed may be a big deal to us because we live here, it has no impact at all on the massiveness that is our universe. Older MMOs were like the old days when we though earth = everything. Individuals seemed much bigger / more important. Modern MMOs are more like our knowledge of the earth being a tiny speck. The individual players are just other tiny specks who unless theyre in your immediate area / circle of friends / guild, mean nothing in the big picture.
Except that the money was never in WoW clones. They didn't understand what made WoW a success and they never figured it out.
As for "forced" its not a term used by anyone seriously. The only game I can think of where grouping was forced were very specific classes in EQ. In every other MMO the groundwork was there for people to socialize, but they didn't have to. Going solo was the harder road, as it is in real life, and how it should be in well designed online games, but it was always possible to solo.
I hate being "forced" to quest grind. That is something the game forces on you by making it nearly impossible to level without doing quests. Such as in LotRO.
Grouping is harder, and should have better rewards as incentive and, well, rewarding your effort. Modern games don't understand this.
It worked in the old days.The socially awkward and their poor social skills simply didn't break in to the genre making for some great communities as people where social not anti social.
Of course they have. They simply can't reproduce it for a variety of reasons. Again social interaction is not even on the radar when it comes to that. All these improvements like maps, and removal of dependencies like buffs are some of those things people applaud but also hurt social interaction. Games are not failing because they implement those things. That's old school vet fantasies of 'I know better' and 'I told you so' that doesn't ring with reality. If people in general really played for the social aspect then the genre would have evolved in that direction
Well.. actually you are both right. Studies have shown the minimal human interaction you to keep sane is around 10 minutes a day and if you do not have that interaction the majority of people will actively seek out conversations. If you do not your social skills will begin to degrade to the point it impairs you speech. Other symtoms include anxiety, stress and depression. This explains why you are more likely to have an elderly person who is living alone talking to the check out girl and why if you have been alone all day you start babbling, particularly if you are a woman.
However, I don't believe the same rules apply to MMOs or chatrooms etc. TBH I find it harder to have a meaningful conversation in games than in real life. However, I have enjoyed the games that have had force grouping and in my mind they have been more memorable experiences. However some people find it difficult to be more socially pro-active, either because of shyness or just simply impatient.
Some people are trying to use MMORPG's as a dating service - for friendship or intimate partners. It's not that simple. It's easy to make friends in the age bracket 4-15 yrs old then it starts to get hard. We get jaded from abuse or simple lack of understanding. I feel sorry for you. I wish there was a way to help but online is not where you want to look for best friends or better. Yeah, I know it sucks.
Other people are using MMORPG's for what they were designed. Like you said OP, going to an online bar just to be around others and not feel so alienated in the God's Green Universe. This view is more realistic.