At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, a behavioral sciences professor from Northwestern University has called into question the idealism of much of our rhetoric on the potential diversity of human networks in MMORPGs.
“Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities” appeared as part of a panel called “Analyzing Virtual Worlds: Next Step in the Evolution of Social Science Research.”
The findings are interesting. According to VWNews:
A group of researchers recently took a look at social habits inside the MMOG Everquest II. Their findings show that players tend to associate with others from their nearby geographical community. Obviously, gameplay heavy MMOGs like Everquest attract a different user than more open-ended or social worlds like Second Life or Habbo, but habits like that could present a challenge to creating international, large-scale communities in virtual worlds.
“People end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know,” social scientist and engineer Noshir Contracto said in a statement. “It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks. You can talk to anyone anywhere, and yet individuals 10 kilometers away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometers away from each other.”
Via Virtual Worlds News, “Research Shows Worldwide MMOGs Not Very Cosmopolitan”
2 Comments
I can’t say this result is surprising. Speaking from personal experience, it is much easier to collaborate online with someone you already trust. It takes a huge investment to build a social network. Why spend the time to build a new one when you can capitalize on existing relationships?
This also reminds me of Goldsmith and Wu’s book Who Controls the Internet?. Simply put, nothing is virtual; physical space will always matter. Particularly with online games, latency is a very real barrier that increases with physical distance. While the internet makes it possible for me to play Gears of War 2 with my friends across the Atlantic, it still takes time for data to travel the distance. While 500 milliseconds might not mean much for a phone conversation, it can take all the fun out of shooting the Locust Horde.
Nonetheless, it is important to look at both sides of the issue. While some hardware, software, and social forces may discourage online gamers from creating new networks, there is still a kernel of truth in utopian rhetoric. As the article emphasizes, online games do strengthen networks. Moreover, broken as they may be, online games still provide multiple mechanisms for cooperation among strangers, perhaps most importantly (as Castronova describes) in the form of a shared mythos, an embodied justification that this cooperative activity is in fact worthwhile.
I disagree. Building social networks in the real world is tedious and time-consuming, because they are materially significant and so am I. In virtual space–especially in gaming contexts–social networks are trivial, even disposable. People “friend” me after a game on XBoxLive all the time: They could care less about me… and I don’t care about them (sorry BornLo53r; sorry FalconWing69). In virtual space, creating a node in the social network is a ready affordance. (Facebook: “Click to confirm this friend.”) Not so in meat space.
I think that, to some degree, there are several game-related choices that players make to compel homogeneity among online communities: In Warcraft, for example, you are encouraged to pick a (relatively) local shard (stateside, Oceanic, or Latin America) for starters. And language localization in WoW means English-speaking countries are all lumped together. Ultimately, though, locale is a common topic of conversation in the guild to which I belong — in which members range from northern Canada to Texas, and across North America. And while some in the guild may recruit from real life networks, the guild’s makeup is so variable — of 120 members, eight joined and three left just yesterday — that some variety is almost guaranteed.
Finally, in terms of data lag (a favorite scapegoat among gamers), I must say that Mario Kart is likely far more intense than any MMORPG in terms of data throughput, but I frequently enjoy Kart races against European and Japanese players (with generally consistent stability of data flow).