Talking To Strangers

This corner of the blogosphere seems to be passing through some kind of reflexive wavefront right now. Everywhere I look I see thoughtful, analytical, detailed discussions. Mechanics, metaphysics, motive, all the tropes of academia - or at least a lively student bar - directed at dissecting, discussing and determining what makes an MMORPG.

There's more to react to than there is time to react, which is both frustrating and energizing. I note with pleasure the long comment threads (and the long comments) that trail many of these thought-provoking posts. Blogging dead? Doesn't seem like it right now.

One of the recent wave of posts that particularly struck a note with me was Naithin's commentary on the Transition from Social to Solo in MMORPG gameplay. We've been round this track more than a few times but there's always more nuance to tease out.

For one thing, I hadn't ever really thought about the provenance of the term "Pick Up Group" before. I tried to think back to when I first heard it. I'm not at all sure it was in use back when I was joining - or recruiting - pick up groups most evenings and every weekend. Google, for once, doesn't have an awful lot to contribute. The earliest reference I could find only went back to 2006. There's a very interesting and detailed game-by-game rundown of usage at TVTropes , which strongly implies a much older heritage, but it sheds little light on provenance.

As far as I recall, we used simply to refer to "groups", without any need for further definition or clarification. I'd probably played MMORPGs for several years before I ever heard the term "Guild Group". People often used to speak of their guild responsibilities and it was commonplace for people to have to leave to "help a guildie" or go on a guild raid, but I can't recall anyone ever leaving a group I was in because they preferred to join an exclusive group of people from their guild just for regular, everyday play.

When I was in a cross-guild chat channel in EverQuest that satisfied most of my grouping requirements, we would fill spots from outside the channel by asking if anyone had friends or guildmates who wanted to run with us. If those people fitted in to our culture we'd invite them to join the channel.

We prided ourselves on being competent and capable but there was a wide variety of skill and experience. We had some very casual players who were great company but needed a degree of direction and some top-end raiders who were there just to chill and relax. We liked to get things done and we liked to challenge ourselves but clearly what was cutting edge content for some of us was slippers and cocoa for others.

In twenty years of playing MMORPGs, the couple of years I spent with the people in that chat channel represent the zenith of my grouping experience. It offered the flexibility and variety of pick up grouping but with the familiarity and structure of a guild or static group. In some ways it prefigured, in social terms if not mechanics, the kind of open group play that eventually grew out of Warhammer's Public Quests.

While, as I said, the members of that chat channel liked to get things done, the real reason we were all there was to chat. Okay, not everyone would have listed their priorities in exactly that order, but fitting in socially was the defining factor on whether guests ended up getting an invite and the way we assessed social suitability had much more to do with affability or snappy repartee than whether you mistimed the odd heal.

In the comment thread that follows Naithin's post there's a discussion about the changing role of text and voice. Jeromai has a theory, to which I also cleave:

"...the design of action-focused games has steadily made it physically impossible or inconvenient to maintain a good typed conversation. Typed conversation has more stately pauses, and takes your fingers away from WASD, causing your characters to pause in whatever they are doing. Given that most people want very much to be actually playing during their game time, every potential sentence is briefly weighed (subconsciously or otherwise) for whether it’s worth utterance."

When I was googling "pick up groups" I came across a fascinating piece of academic research at Wiley's Online Library, entitled "Where Everybody Knows Your Name". It's a dense and very heavily referenced paper and I haven't even begun to dig into the detail, but just on a quick scan some paragraphs positively jump out:

"Text‐based interaction in such worlds is incessant and ubiquitous. There is not just one chat channel but multiple simultaneous ones: public, private, and various group channels. Together, these function as both a one‐to‐many and one‐to‐one communicative space..."

Despite the encroachment of voice chat, that seems to me still to be the case, at least in the MMORPGs I play. In Guild Wars 2, for example, voice communications are almost de rigeur in many World vs World squads but that doesn't mean no-one talks in type. Quite the opposite, in fact. It just adds yet another layer.

It's become a truism to state that the exponential growth of social media and the mainstreaming of instantaneous global communication has stripped the magic and mystique from talking in real-time to strangers on the other side of the world. And it most likely has.

Whether that has very much to do with the changing attitudes to running dungeons with strangers, I'm becoming less certain every time I think about it. As for the accepted narrative that people no longer want to talk to strangers in MMOs these days, the more I think about that, the less convincing I find it.

I talk to strangers every day, in GW2 and EverQuest II and pretty much in whatever MMORPG I happen to find myself. Not, as I once did, in group chat seen by no more then five or six other people, but in open channels where the conversations bounce between dozens of participants in front of an unknowable audience, any of whom might join in at any moment.

It's entirely commonplace for me to be calling out scouting information in Map chat, arguing with someone in Team, making sarcastic comments to Mrs Bhagpuss about other players in Guild and bantering in Squad, all while I'm on auto-run across the map in the middle of the Zerg. It's much the same as I've been doing in a variety of channels in  a multiplicity of MMOs for two decades.

The only element that's missing from the mix are those rambling group chats on personal and out-of-game topics we used to indulge in between pulls and those, it seems to me, were more a function of the specific combat mechanics of those games than any kind of end in themselves. If you have to sit down and do nothing for anything up to five minutes after every big fight you have to pass the time somehow...

I don't feel there's been quite as much of a move away from the old methods, either of communication or socialization in MMORPGs as has sometimes - often - been claimed. I'm not sure there will be, either. People do like to talk, and text is orders of magnitude more efficient than voice in the context of the shared "third spaces" of MMOs.

Which isn't to say that online games in general aren't travelling in a different direction. They are. The widely-praised non-text, non-speech communication system built into Apex Legends suggests that mainstream gaming is evolving away from the kind of personalized, intimate relationships we've so long taken for granted towards a more functional, gameplay-directed future.

Battle Royales aren't MMORPGs, though. Not hardly. MMORPG players like to chat. If they can't do it during fights they'll go sit somewhere safe and do it there instead. I don't see any sign of that ending any time soon.