| It
may seem strange to think of death
as something that shapes relationships, but in MMORPGs death plays
a role in how relationships form. When you die in EverQuest (EQ),
all your equipment and money remain with your corpse and you are teleported
back to a safe spot naked. Death often occurs in dangerous places,
and corpse retrieval is in and of itself dangerous. In other words,
death is expensive in EQ. The heavy expense of death encourages trust
among team members. In other games, such as City of Heroes, death
is relatively cheap and has a much lower leverage on trust development
among players. Other factors such as frequency of down-time and character
dependence also play a role in creating a “dangerous” world.
It is only in worlds where there is true risk that trusting relationships
can form. In a safe, rubber-padded world, players never have to depend
on other players.
We could also think of these game mechanics as a
form of social engineering - tools that influence the frequency
of new relationships forming and the degree to which trust develops
in a world. But online environments offer a far more tantalizing
way of engineering relationships. Because every player sees their
own rendering of the world, the world can in turn be tailored to
every individual player. For example, we know that eye gaze induces
trust and rapport in conversations. In the real world, we can only
maintain eye contact with one person at a time, but in a virtual
world, a presenter can maintain eye contact with everyone at the
same time. We also know that the mimicry
of speech patterns or body gestures also encourages trust and rapport
in social interactions. What if non-player characters greeted you
with the greeting phrases that you most commonly use? What if non-player
characters had first names that began with the first letter of your
character’s name? More importantly, could these mechanisms encourage
trust and rapport at a community level? Even though MMORPGs are
thought of as entertaining games, they are in fact social experiments
in relationship formation and community building with many possibilities
left to explore.
See also:
- Engineering
Altruism
External Links:
- Transformed
Social Interaction: Decoupling Representation from Behavior and
Form in Collaborative Virtual Environments by Jeremy Bailenson
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