11 October 2005

Heat into Light: Community Generating Conflict in Online Multiplayer Games 
By Jonathan Baron

The word "community" in the context of online gaming and the internet is rapidly becoming as oft used and as meaningless as the word "love" in the offline world. Online community has, instead, become a Rorschach test – an image obvious to every spectator, yet something that many people imagine or define differently. Although it’s not easy, or even advisable in some cases, to try and define, once and for all, the feel good word of the day, this is what this lecture means to do. It begins with conflict – if there is no underlying conflict your collection of people is a supermarket checkout line, not a community. Unfortunately "conflict" is a loaded word, and this paper explores the issue of conflict as a community building engine in ways wholly apart from killing adversaries or blowing things up.

Persistent world online games are not really games at all. They are virtual worlds that lure and involve their players through game mechanics. In this way players create adventures, but there are no winners, no losers, no beginning, except for individuals, and no end to the game. Thus, a multiplayer game is an endless narrative, told by the audience. The ultimate reward, however, has little to do with game play: it’s the community that players become a part of. Although many game developers pay lip service to communities, few comprehend their mysteries. As evidence of this, let’s look at the evidence.

First, and most important of all, development of an online community requires conflict. If there is no conflict, you may think you have a community when all you really have is a supermarket checkout line: a group of people in one place, acting in a civil or even a pleasant fashion, with whom you have no connection that penetrates to the personal level. Unfortunately, the word "conflict" is even more misunderstood than the word "community." Conflict, especially in a computer gaming context, conjures up one thing: combat. Combat is further broken down into genres: shooters, simulation, strategy, and so forth, each of which has layer upon layer of weapons and armor grades adapted to each genre. The point? The nature of this conflict suggests that game developers did not have community development as their chief priority. Rather, they set out to provide experiences that recognized computer game players would embrace, and had the community more or less presented to them afterward – often, much to their horror.

An online game community exists outside the game, as a consequence of game play. It exists on the message boards, mail lists, and player web sites. Yet only a tiny fraction of today’s online game offerings give you so much as a hint to where you find the community, much less provide community sites the players want. Only a very few provide a direct route to community sites from within the game itself. It is indisputable that the communities online games generate are their most important product, not just in some feel-good sense, but in the cold hard cash that customer retention and word of mouth promotion brings. Yet nearly every online game hosts the game and little else. They are like a factories that produce a product, yet make no arrangements to ship or deliver it. Rather, they let customers take delivery on their own, and do with it what they will.

Simply put, most online game developers still believe that the game is the product. The community spawned by the game, for them, falls into the realm of, "whatever." Far from seeing the importance of hosting the community, most would like to have as little to do with the community as possible. This is hardly a peculiar point of view. Many people view the internet as a boiling chaos of faceless souls behaving in shrill and rude ways. What online game developers fail to understand, however, is that the power of their medium is the ability to transform this anarchy into civilization. The developers, by the nature of the conflict their games offer, and the accommodations their games make for persistent groups, are responsible for the type and tone of the communities arising from their games.

To build your product, take a medium that often serves as an antisocial catharsis for socially inept or inexperienced people, make sure you package it and market it in a manner that both appeals to them and repulses socially healthy souls, and deliver it with a twist: your product takes this audience and tosses them together into the same online environment. Now, tell me you’re shocked that you now have to build obscenity filters, devise ever more elaborate hack checking schemes, field hundreds of complaints a day – many of them in all caps email filled with misspellings and bad or absent grammar – and ban accounts from your game, permanently, on a daily basis. The internet is not predominantly a nasty environment; you, unwittingly, have issued an invitation that readily appeals to the online equivalent of the barbarian horde.

If you’re not going to offer mainstream computer game conflict, what will you offer? Certainly you’d have little chance for success creating a game called Field of Daisies, where players roam a plush landscape filled with nothing but flowers that magically regenerate as you pick them. There must be a motive, friction opposing that motive, and risk associated with satisfying it. Simply, there must be conflict. Let’s step back from traditional computer gaming conflict for a moment, and look at the conflict that builds and sustains other sorts of online communities.

As noted earlier, an online community is not simply a collection of souls. It’s many things, but for the purpose of this lecture, we’re going to employ three of the more obvious requirements:

1. Persistent Members – an online community is not a revolving door. It can absorb and endure lots of people who only drop by for a short time, but it is sustained by long term members.

2. Discussion beyond a special, narrow interest. One of the most compelling aspects to online communities is their ability to regularly connect more people interested in a specialized or esoteric topic than could ever meet, day-to-day, in the physical world. Yet if they stick to the topic, and only the topic, you don’t have a community, you have a special interest group. This is what online forums were often called years ago - SIGs – and most were heavily moderated to prevent off-topic discussion. As anyone involved with SIGs knows, they were not ideal for getting to know people.

3. Development of relationships that transcend the virtual setting. Members of true online communities invariably arrange to communicate with each other outside the forum. This can be through the telephone, email, or even travel.

Now let’s look at two non-game online communities that meet the above criteria, and examine the conflict that created them and sustains them. Both examples attract a broad cross section of people, their message forums require no moderation, there is no obscenity filter, and no member has ever been banned.

This site is dedicated to wrist watches. It has an extremely active message forum with many members that have been reading and posting regularly to it for a lengthy period. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of discussion about watches, but a surprising amount of the talk heads in all sorts of directions.

A watch says a lot about a person. Watch selection reflects the world at large, much the way automobiles do. Entry to the community begins with people going to the forum to gain information about various watches they’re thinking of buying. Some folks are into features, others are enamored with technology, still others see the watch as an expression of tradition. Thus the esthetes join battle with the technos who joust with the old school. Then there are the people who want their watch to express only one thing: their importance and affluence. People used to online games will find this conflict muted, but it is one of the most important of all community generating forms of conflict: conflict that penetrates the veneer of our crafted personas to reveal who we essentially are.

This is an email list of people who either own or are interested in the Luscombe 8 series light airplanes, originally designed and sold in the late 1930s and later, after World War II, in the mid to late 1940s. Sustained membership on this list spans years, and members range in age from their mid-20s to their mid-to-late-80s. Not only is this a very active list, much of the discussion centers on subjects apart from flying or aviation. Many of the list members have gone to heroic lengths to meet one another, face to face, as well.

These aircraft are old and difficult to handle, in the take off and landing phases of flight, compared to modern general aviation airplanes. Facing this conflict, and succeeding, provides the initial rite of passage into the community’s circle. These are also airplanes with poorly documented systems and maintenance procedures. Facing this conflict, and gaining this rare knowledge, provides an additional rite of passage into the community’s experts circle. Learning the subtleties of how these aircraft handle in a variety of situations is a further source of conflict – in part because pilot operating handbooks of the era were remarkably short on performance data, and in part because flying is not something mastered over a short period of time. Experts in this area enter the community’s elders circle. Flying itself is often an emotionally and spiritually intense experience. The conflict is capturing that in words in a manner than resonates with the community. Doing so provides a rite of passage and an additional role – the community’s story tellers. All these conflicts taken together provide both the personally revealing conflict of TIMEZONE.COM, and another product of conflict equally essential to the development of any community: a defined sense of identity.

An alluring challenge need not involve a life or death struggle. It can be something as simple as finding the right watch for you, mastering a rewarding skill, or figuring out a way to build something that suits you. Sitting out there by the millions is a socially hungry audience that’s eager to find a setting where they can shed the anonymity of the internet, and develop relationships that will last years and decades. You won’t attract them with the blood vapor effects afforded by the latest particle system, a new improved magic or combat system, or the cool sounds your game makes when you blow something up. Anyone who understands that was not surprised in the least by the popularity of fishing, mining, sewing, or carpentry in Ultima Online.

The problem with non-combat conflict to-date, however, has been the non-social nature of it. For example, a miner in UO wants to stay as far away from other players as possible. As people mine an area the ore is exhausted.

Non-combat online game conflict – its future motive friction – needs to evolve into challenges that don’t involve the death penalty, yet demonstrate aspects of players that afford them the opportunity to group with others who have something in common, and create something that establishes their identity. All you need is something that occupies their minds, and happens faster if they work with others. Settle the west, build a cattle ranch, create a town. Plant crops, round up the herd, go on a cattle drive. Raise money and build a railroad. Explore space, found a colony. All of these things have been featured in successful computer games, yet these sorts of conflict sources have rarely been offered in online games, or have existed as sidelines in them.

The type and intensity of game conflict shape the community the game creates as completely and as certainly as our DNA shapes us. All games must provide you with something you want, and something that stands in the way of your getting it. This is what motive friction is, and all of us in gaming understand it very well – it’s the very essence of game design. Those of us in the online gaming segment of the industry have found that motive friction can become something far beyond a game player challenge: it’s the relationship accelerating engine that drives the development of online communities.

However, because of the influence of single player gaming, online games have tended to generate communities that have often become dysfunctional on some levels. This not only takes a toll in support and development costs, it also limits the market for the medium. People with a long history in online gaming may be impressed with 200,000 subscribers, and 60,000 simultaneous players, but these numbers are miniscule compared to the potential audience on the internet, and microscopic compared to major entertainment media.

By expanding our understanding of conflict and community, we can take greater control in the future of the online games we create – games that spawn communities that work better for all concerned, developers and members alike.

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