It's not a game... it's multiple games...

... and I'm thinking whether people are really unhappy about the latest Linden changes may have a lot to do with which game(s) they, as individuals, are playing.

I imagine plenty of people here have seen this article, but just in case:

HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS, by Richard Bartle
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Before I get a stack of flames that SL is not a MUD, yes, I am aware of this. But I think the concepts in this article are pertinent to players on SL, because the article is about the behavior of people in shared online worlds, not about MUD technology. People haven't changed that much since this article was written, and it looks to me like it applies pretty well to SL.

A quick summary/excerpt:



The rest of the paper is really worth reading or at least skimming. If nothing else, take a look at the population dynamic chart near the bottom.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that I think the recent changes LL has made to the monetary system of SL have some effects on the balance and dynamics between these four groups of players in SL (hopefully intentional). In my (perhaps hasty) analysis, the biggest impact is on Achievers (as defined above). Explorers (folks who just like building, scripting, and wandering around looking at what everyone else has done) are probably indifferent, as are Socializers (who can always find someone to talk with) and Killers (i.e. Griefers), who are having a field day on the forums and in arguments inworld, but probably won't be able to make this a grief topic for long.

There are a couple of possible kinds of Achievers in SL, depending on whether one is playing in an unsafe area (e.g. Jesse) or a specifically "gamelike" area (e.g. Dark Life), but the rest of the time the clearest sense of Achievement in SL is probably net worth in $L, land, and paid inventory. Folks who are motivated by how high their weekly bonus is, how much land they own, how many outfits or yachts they've been able to buy, etc. are Achievers in this sense. Their "game rules" have just been pretty heavily altered. They are understandably unhappy (but at the same time, their unhappiness is hard to understand by other players who are primarily Socializers, Explorers, or Killers).

As far as I can tell, Second Life looks to be a system in which all four groups exist in some measure -- an attempt at a balanced world (Type 3 in Bartle's taxonomy). If Bartle's MUD theories hold true in SL, this is a difficult configuration to reach, but stable and with great potential to grow if reached. So I guess my question is, did LL think there were too many Achievers compared to other groups? Are they trying to encourage another group to expand, for population balance reasons? Did they think the Achievers were threatened in the long run by their monetary inflation problem, and move specifically to protect Achievers? Or are they perhaps trying to change the definition of "Achievement" in SL?

Or perhaps LL hasn't thought of any of this. If so, I think maybe they might want to. The Achievers are likely to be a pretty big chunk of the population in SL, and changing achievement rules unexpectedly (even for the long-term benefit of Achievers) is always going to really irritate them. If too many of them leave, the system *might* wobble and find a new balance point as a primarily Socializing system, but I wouldn't want to gamble on it.

Comments welcome....

Neko
(Pretty firmly in the Explorer quadrant, but with plenty of sympathy for Achievers and Socializers, as it's not likely that a world consisting entirely of Explorers would be viable or interesting, even for other Explorers.)

Nekokami, thank you for posting that. I have been thinking almost the exact same thing over the almost 2 months that I’ve been a resident of SL. Mostly, I’ve been just watching and learning. SL is a fascinating sociological experiment; what happens if you create an artist colony and expand its boundaries so that others live there as well. I find SL to be an interesting microcosm of society. One of the things I find fascinating is the corresponding number of “doesn’t play well with others” types to society at large. If I look down my block of 30 homes, only 1 is a problem neighbor. My guess is that this ratio in SL is more like 1 in every 50 residents who are antagonistic. The Lindens have given us a basic set of operating rules, but beyond that, we get the society here in SL that we make.

Our avitars may be our alter egos, but they are still driven by human emotion and we bring with us all our RL baggage. What is equally fascinating is the changes in behavior between when people post here in the forums and their behavior in-world. Somehow, being face to face in world makes people a bit more respectful of each other as opposed to the outright hostility that surfaces regularly here in the forums.

Overall, I think most people are here because they like the creative palette available to them, whether that be building, scripting or just decking an AV out in finery. SL is just about the only game that doesn’t involve destruction (killing things, blowing things up, etc…) which makes it fairly unattractive for those with an aggressive predisposition (also why I suspect there really are more women here than men, not discounting those experimenting with gender.)

Thanks, Isablan. Though you and I may be the only ones thinking along these lines... or at least the only ones wanting to post about it. Maybe it's an Explorer thing.

Neko

I'd say you missed some pretty essential types:

* Contributor - Someone whose goal is to create something that facilitates the gameplay of others.

* Saboteur - Someone whose goal is to interfere with the enjoyment of others for their personal gratification.

(Edit: I guess this would be your greifer. Never mind, then. )

* Voyeur - Someone who doesn't engage in any socialization or content creation, but instead just watches others as a silent "lurker".

Interesting subject, Nekokami. Anyone have any other types to suggest?

I do think you make some valid points, Cubey.

Maybe to expand Nekokami’s original 4:

Achievers: have something tangible they want out of the game, be that a cool building, a fabulous script, a reputation as a premier clothing designer, land, Linens, etc.. Whatever the goal, it is qualifiable and can be defined as “success” by some parameter distinctly held by the individual. The ultimate goal is to feel like they have achieved in-world success.

Explorers: (of which a subset are voyeurs) are the visitors to the museum, not the artists. I stand, awestruck, at some of the builds in SL. I envy the skill involved, but am not driven enough to spend the time necessary to match that skill. I think Explorers feel an obligation to pos rate exceptional builds, no matter what the cost. Explorers are the philosophers of SL, they want to know, want to understand, want to fill themselves with the beauty and ingenuity of what SL has to offer. Voyeurs are Explorers who aren’t brave enough to jump into the pool. They want to know, want to see…but only from a safe distance, only if they don’t have to make an emotional investment.

Communicators: these are the empaths of SL, they socialize, chat and provide general entertainment. They know everybody, everyplace and they are more finely tuned in to other AV’s rather than the build they happen to be standing in. An empty build holds no interest to communicators. Being seen is a critical component, which is why they are the shoppers of SL. You won’t find hoochie hair on an Explorer and probably not on an Achiever, unless their goal involves being head mistress of dance club.

Mavens: (concept taken from The Tipping Point) are the educators and helpers of SL. These are the helpers of noobs, people who try to mediate disputes and who facilitate the enjoyment of others. The people want to make SL a better place for the Achievers, the Explorers, the Rebels and the Communicators.

Rebels: the prophets, geniuses, madmen, mystics and revolutionaries who exist in SL purely to provide street theatre. They keep things stirred up and are sometimes confused with agitators, but they provide an important function in bringing new creative energies into SL.

Agitators: these are the destructive and negative force in SL. Greifers, troublemakers and put-down artists. Agitators differ from Rebels in that their goal is largely to provoke misery and say f’you to all passersby. Agitators feed off of hostility.


In all honesty, I genuinely believe that you can “role play” only to a certain extent. Who you choose to be in SL is an extension of who you are in RL, even if that extension is carefully buried under a respectable exterior by day. There are an awful lot of upright citizens by day who turn up in SL with a whip and leather lingerie. I would guess this is why a lot RL relationships that carry over into SL become troubled. You have to be fairly open minded to see the sides of your mate that might remain hidden under normal circumstances. SL allows us to play act and live out virtual fantasies; I’m not entirely sure I want to know all of my RL boyfriend’s fantasies…and I’m VERY certain I don’t want to share all of mine A little mystery keeps relationships fresh.

Anyway, my point was that, IMHO, we can’t help but be who we are, despite role playing and avitars.

I wanna be a Disco Bandit.

Isablan, I like your categorization, but it still doesn't capture the motivations of strongly creative players. Presumably you'd put us into Achievers:



But this category is really about a feeling of success based on having accomplished something. The feeling of success is primary.

For strongly creative players the process itself is the primary reward. It's a form of play. Getting ideas, sketching them on paper, perhaps creating a rough 3D model in-game, then refining it, testing each stage, and adapting the original design as implementation proceeds -- this is play. It's fun for it's own sake.

Many of us like to create the things we want ourselves, even though a much better product could be found in a store. For example, there are several very good texture creators in SL, but I keep firing up PSP, and learning to make my own. It's more fun. As my skill improves I'm learning to make textures that exactly match the requirements of particular architectural components. You'd probably get similar comments from players who create avatars, animations and so on.

As you can imagine, the creatives are somewhat insulated from changes in the economy. Building in the sandbox is free. There are easygoing clients who appreciate experimental work. Some of us use our land as private sandboxes or workshops. There's no pressing need to burden ourselves with the chores and expense of establishing a retail presence in malls if we don't enjoy that aspect of the game.

How about givng us our own category! : D

I'm a griefer.

Traxx, In the original article, Explorers would start with breadth, wandering around looking at everything, and then go to depth, tinkering with the system. The Depth Explorers are the Builders and Scripters, who make things simply because they enjoy making things and understanding how to make things. But I know people who don't take it in that order, necessarily. I think the two are related, and if you only have 4 categories, probably they go together, but there's no particular reason to stop with 4 categories.

I tend to agree that Voyeurs are a sort of proto-explorer.

Isablan, I wondered about the Mavens/Instructors/Helpers, too. In Bartle's original, folk who wander around looking for newbies with whom to interfere, even positively, are categorized as "Killers," which I think is over-simplification. I favor a seperate Helper category, because I don't think what motivates Helpers to meddle is at all like what motivates Killers to meddle.

I also think you had a good point about clothing as an esssential part of the Socializer's need to "be seen", though I think there's an Achiever element there, too. But clothing "makes a statement," so it's a kind of communication.

The "Contributor" is an interesting category, Cubey. Are they motivated by status? That might make them some kind of Achiever. Are they motivated by wanting to help others by improving their experiences? That would make them a Helper. Are they motivated by wanting to push the limits of the system? Then they'd be some kind of Explorer. I guess it would be interesting to do a really large poll about this and try some statistical factor analysis on the results, to see where the groups tend to clump up. I'd need the help of LL to get a wide enough distribution of the survey to make it worthwhile, though, because only a subset of people read the fora, and I'm not confident that the ratios in the fora are the same as those in-world.

Rebels... hm... are they sort of a cross between Communicators/Socializers and Explorers? Pushing the limits on the social aspect of SL? Or are they something else entirely? I think there is a strong Socializer component in them, though, because they need an audience to function. That's a really interesting group.

So we might have a list that looks something like this:

Achievers
Explorers
- Voyeurs
- Breadth (Surveyors?)
- Depth (Builders, scripters... maybe this is "Tinkerers?" "Divers?"
Communicators/Socializers
Griefers
- Combat folks
- other Griefers (Anyone have a catchy title?)
Mavens/Helpers

And some possible cross-types:
Shoppers (Socializer x Achiever)
Rebel (Socializer x Explorer? Socializer x Achiever? Socializer x Griefer?)
Contributors (Explorer-Depth x Maven?)

Oh, and of course, "Disco Bandit." (Should I call that "Rebel"?)

What else? Better titles? Groups missed? Other possible combinations?

Neko

I agree that people are playing very different games, using some of the same available tools, but sometimes at different ends of the spectrum. They are in very different communities, genres, cultures. It makes people uncomfortable to point out that these interests, tastes, motivations at times clash, and represent irresolvable conflict, but there it is -- it can be seen every time a thread begins about an obstructive ugly build that terrorizes the neighbourhood, or a thread begins about how someone has spent thousands of real dollars on the game but gotten terrible service or been unable to accomplish even reasonable goals due to all the game's vicissitudes.

I'm not sure I agree with your categories, or maybe more have to be added, but to make any suggestion about how to analyze it, I'd have to think about it a lot more. What's clear to me is that these cultures or games or genres produce very different expectations. That's why some people are howling about the latest economic changes and others are gloating that they've ridden the tide or even profited form the latest economic changes.

Some people took the dwell, ratings, and event grants and made that a game-within-a-game that was a lot of fun for them. Others just sort of looked at those point as nice little extras, but didn't really think about them as they experimented in their sandbox or made real money with some fantastic skin or invention for dancing or something like that.

It's troubling that the SL environment gets tinkered with this wildly such as to pull the rug out from some players and make them indignant, and plump up other players and make them gloat that they "did the right thing" according to the dynamics of the game as they read it at a given moment. There ought to be a more level playing field created.

I wanna be a Sauceror. ')

Prokofy, you make some interesting points. I think we all agree that there are a number of different motivations driving what keeps people in SL.

A great many of the problems in SL (if not all) are directly related to similar problems in RL. Let’s take the big issue of ugly builds. Beauty has always been noted to be in eye of the beholder and people have an innate tendency to want to match like with like. Communities everywhere in RL stage protests over what they consider to be ugly buildings and/or the new strip mall going in, the McMansion on the next block over, the planned power plant being drafted just over the bridge, the upscale resort that now blocks their view, etc… The clash between developers and residential is eternal and will never change. That clash is what has given us “master planned” communities, where everything matches and are widely detested/loved depending on your viewpoint. I do think that SL would be better served by designating some sims as “master planned” and some as “anything goes”, the trick is that both have to be surrounded by water. The obvious problem is that restrictions stifle creativity, society generally tends to pound down the nails that stand up and SL is an escape where creativity is the norm, not the exception.

The second problem is that the tensions between “taste” are probably insurmountable. Several of my neighbors consider my RL purple house to be rather garish; others absolutely love it. When you allow people to “do their own thing”, you have to expect that some of them are going to do things that you don’t approve of. This does not mean, however, that there isn’t a good solid line between expressing one’s creativity and harassment of one’s neighbors.

I genuinely think Linden Labs has an incredibly difficult task assigned to them: playing god. In order to balance the financial needs of the company to grow SL, there must be some kind of reward here for the communicators/socializers because this is where most of the new growth of SL is going be. This leads to an elitist divide that shows up in every other thread now and, not surprisingly, also permeates our RL political system. It is completely human nature to desire exclusivity. We all want to belong to something exclusive because it sets us apart and makes us special, this fills a primary human need for validation. We form cliques and clubs, create gated communities, look for trends to jump on…all because we don’t want to be left out. When something becomes mass market, it loses it’s cache, it’s hipness; it ceases to be cool. The challenge that LL has is to keep SL cutting edge while increasing it’s mass-market appeal in order fuel expansion.

Humans operate on a pain/pleasure system, and it has to be assumed that SL is done exclusively for pleasure. So, enough people have to find pleasure in SL in order for LL to keep the bills paid and afford expansion. Yet, the pure business decisions have to also be balanced with the needs of the community. Unlike other games, people actually build lives here in SL, which gives them a far greater emotional stake in the community. A lot of people think LL interferes too much in SL, but a lot of people also think they don’t interfere enough. At some point the community has to make a decision whether or not it is going to form it’s own governing body to handle issues in-world or if we are going to continuously look to LL to solve our problems. Somebody has to ultimately be the bad guy and make the unpopular decisions.

Hmmmm. My category would be the semi-recluse who likes to make things and tinker with scripts. Don't know what this would be called. Mad Scientist? Nutjob? Eccentric? Goofball? The mind boggles.

Mad Scientist sounds good to me!

Here's my list so far:

Achievers
Explorers (including Voyeurs and more serious must-see-all folks)
Mad Scientists (builders and scripters)
Communicators/Socializers
Fighters (folks who like the combat system)
Griefers (including curmudgeons as well as spammers and saboteurs)
Mavens/Helpers

And some possible cross-types:
Shoppers (Socializer x Achiever)
Rebel (Socializer x Explorer? Socializer x Achiever? Socializer x Griefer?)
Contributors (Mad Scientist x Maven?)

Maybe I ought to think about this in terms of Meyers-Briggs types, for which general population characteristics are established. What do the rest of you think?

It's a shame the poll can't be updated, but I guess that would undermine whatever validity it might posess. Perhaps after this thread has gone on a bit longer I'll start a new one with a better poll, using the categories generated here. But I still think the results won't necessarily represent the in-world population, because I suspect a couple of groups are better represented in forum traffic than others, compared to their sizes in-world.

I think the most constructive path toward creating a "level playing field" for all types is to try to identify the types, their needs, and their proportions, and think seriously about the dynamics between these groups, as Bartle did in his article. It may not be possible to make one environment truly fit all groups equally, but changing the rules (and satisfaction) for one group is likely to have consequences on other groups via inter-group dynamics, and the better this is understood, the better the consequences can be mitigated.

But then, that's my general approach to life... the mileage of this idea with others is bound to vary.

Neko

Neko, have you ever read Daniel Goleman's "Emotional Intelligence"? It has some concepts that I think you would find interesting.

One that stands out for me is a study they note on impulse control and the marshmallow test. Those kids that were able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow immediately, had greater long-term success in life. (Do a google search to find more info)

I would suspect, that the people screaming the loudest about the ratings and bonus changes are those with the least amount of impulse control. The idea of saving to buy the things they want is unsupportable, in their view. I think a lot of people would assume this to be a particularly American trait, but I get the distinct impression in SL that it is across the board. Any country that has been Westernized enough to have a broadband connection seems to have an impulse control issue.

Just more food for thought .....

This idea actually relates to the idea in Austrian Economics of time-preferences and time-horizons. Inflation creates pressure to have a short time horizon, since savings are eroded and basic materials become more and more expensive. This leads to poor impulse control, as you have noted, when people "normalize" this behavior (once inflation has gone on long enough...). This warps demand curves, leading to further time horizon problems, and ripples through all of society.
The decadence of 1920s society was no accident. It was the result of really opening the valve for the first time on the money supply.

So in some sense, what LL has done recently may contribute to an SL population with better impulse control. People will save because they have to, capital will accumulate, prices will drop, and people will "normalize" this as the new reality, and in the long run, theoretically, great prosperity will result.