Alone Again Or

Naithin at Time To Loot has a post up, bouncing off a YouTube video by Josh Strife Hayes. The video, which I've embedded below for those who don't feel like clicking on a link, is called How the MMO became less social and it's three-quarters of one of the best analyses of the much-discussed phenomenon that I've seen.

I would recommend watching it all the way through... or listening to it in the background while you do something else, for example play an mmorpg. It's basically a lecture. It would make more sense as a podcast than a YouTube video although I did discover from watching the first few minutes that Runes of Magic is a better-looking game than I remembered.

The first three sections are lucidly argued. I found myself agreeing with most of the points made. It was the fourth segment that Naithin's post highlighted, though, the chapter entitled "The shifting of social interactions to 3rd party platforms", and that was the part I found the least convincing.

Josh draws threads from the previous three parts together to make the case that socialization in mmorpgs hasn't disappeared altogether, it's just gone somewhere else. As someone who's very much part of the problem he describes under the second and third headings ("The genre popularity boom and rise of the solo player" and "The catering of systems to the solo player"), a player for whose increasingly solipsistic tastes the entire genre has been redefined, I find myself in a precarious position, discussing how players might these days find themselves engaging in what passes for organized content.

I'll take Naithin's word for it that such players today often "organise dungeon content. Raids. Heck, any group content" on external platforms like Discord (It's always Discord, isn't it?). If that's the case, though, I would question just how much of a change it represents.

You call it bragging, I call it socializing.

Larger formal content like raids has always been organized externally but even in the early days, most quasi-formal appointments-to-play, from guild events to weddings, were generally handled outside of the games themselves. As far back as 2001-2 I was having to make accounts with various hosting platforms, register for services like Magelo, set passwords and sign in to forums, just so I could find out what guilds I'd joined were planning. And those were family guilds, not raiders.

I remember it now because I found it so irritating then, but I knew you couldn't get by as a supposed "social" player just on the in-game communication channels alone. The people for whom those were paramount were, ironically, those most resistant to the overt social aspects of the genre. People who were focused on ad hoc content, on character-based activities, on leveling up and playing alts.

Socialization in those days was gameplay, even if you weren't social about it. Even for a soloist, the experience was defined by relationships with others, in that case as much by a refusal to participate as a wish to be included. I do think one long-forgotten aspect of solo play in pre-World of Warcraft mmorpgs is just how proud solo players were of their skills. They soloed not because no-one would group with them but because they didn't need anyone to group with them.

There's a whole different post to be written about how the genre's drift towards soloability has contributed to the attritional decline of true solo play. Maybe I'll get to that another time. Sticking with the topic at hand, the slow but steady transition of the mmorpg genre from one in which gameplay is predicated on in-game socialization to one in which the overwhelming majority of content is available to all regardless of willingness to socialize represents a fundamental change that can't be hand-waved away by a misconcatenation of interactions that share only a few surface similarities.

In the beginning, mmorpgs were ultra-social. Everything Josh says about the early days rings true to me from my own experience. Being able to fight monsters side-by-side with people on the other side of the world and talk to them while doing it was mindboggling. The games operated as de facto social media platforms even before the term "social media" had currency. 

If you need a favor you still have to ask.

 

These are not new insights. They're concepts often discussed and widely accepted nowadays. But Josh does highlight something much less frequently noted: some of what we glibly term "socializing" was, in fact, core gameplay content. 

There's a kind of accepted wisdom about the old LFG days. How much time was wasted, standing around in a city or at the entrance to a dungeon, spamming /shout or /ooc with your virtual CV, hoping someone would at least acknowledge your existence before you had to give up and log out. It all makes things sound quite pathetic and painfully dull. 

And it could be. But what you hear far less of, something Josh alludes to but doesn't elaborate on, is how putting groups together could be fun. How coming up with effective ways to sell yourself as a useful, desirable group member was a skill as satisfying to improve as two-hand blunt or evocation. How people became as well-known for their group-building prowess as their tanking skills. Much is said about the value of reputation in those days: in my experience almost nothing gave higher social status than a rep as someone who could build and run really strong, effective groups.

Generally, when older players harp on about what was lost, they make too much of how "we sat around between pulls and chatted". Yes, we did do that, a lot, but for my money real "socializing" never revolved around fireside conversation as we waited for the cleric to get her mana back. It wasn't swapping stories about what we were doing outside the game that made for strong bonds. It was discussing what we were going to do in it.

My strongest memories of social interactions from the golden age of the genre mainly involve planning sessions as we brainstormed tactics to achieve some immediate gameplay goal. That's what no longer happens in most of the mmorpgs I play, largely because, as Josh explains, the need for such tactical concerns has been designed out of the genre.

Once it was groups. Now it's maps.

 

It's why I'm looking forward to the return of the Marionette fight to Guild Wars 2. It's a rare example in modern times of content that regularly generated the kind of in the moment tactical discussions I relish. That's the kind of social gameplay I enjoy.

And that's why I don't see the burgeoning acceptance and use of third-party platforms for communication between people with a shared interest in mmorpgs as a replacement or even a corollary for the kind of gameplay-based social interactions upon which the genre made its name. And that's if we accept on face value the argument that the average mmorpg player is making widespread use of social media these days.

I wonder if they are? Discord, as has been discussed in this corner of the blogosphere a number of times of late, is far from being accepted as a universal good. Some people like it, some people put up with it, some people can't stand it. In the games I play it's not at all unusual to hear people being critical of out-of-game platforms, not because of any inherent flaws in the software but because they're deemed to be an inappropriate way to communicate.

A lot of that is most likely based on age and experience. Older players are less likely to want to move their conversations to new and unfamiliar platforms, partly out of an innate resistance to change but also from previous failures. How many different communication media will a ten-year veteran already have signed up for and then found themselves not using a few months later?

Some of the resistance, though, is structural. Communication that takes place outside of the game is by definition not part of the game. It's related to it but not of it. To some players that's not why they're playing. They want to be part of a self-contained imaginary world that has internal consistency. That's hard enough already without making further concessions to asynchronous social media or voice chat.

Some people never speak. Some people never shut up.

 

I'm not going to fight for the flag on this one. I have no way of knowing how widespread the use of 3rd party social media platforms within the wider mmorpg audience might be. In a way, though, the more widespread it is, the less it means. 

Josh refers to a whole range of providers - YouTube, Discord, Twitch, Facebook - as though a shared interest expressed across those for a commonly-held hobby makes for some kind of cohesive social bond. If that's true then it must also apply to all fans of, well, anything. It's just too general to have significance.

As he says, at the start mmorpgs were doing something new, something unique. Now they share those functions with much larger, more popular, more successful platforms, processes and providers. That mmorpg players also use those platforms says much about the pervasive influence and acceptance of social media but it doesn't necessarily indicate a straightforward change of venue.

Everyone uses social media. Of course that includes mmorpg players. Just because we socialize outside the games we play doesn't mean we've simply transferred our in-game social structures and practices to a new host. The games aren't social any more, not in the way they were. Talking about them on social media doesn't change that. Making plans with our friends about what we're going to do when we see them in game doesn't change that. 

Josh had it right in the set-up: for mmorpgs, socialization was gameplay. His conclusion, that "the social aspect has simply moved out of the game" won't stand up.

If the socialization isn't in the game, it's not part of the game. And that's not, in itself, a bad thing. Not everything has been lost. The genre hasn't become asocial, just differently socialized. I prefer things as they are now. I like the new forms of socialization that have replaced the old.

That's why my game of choice for much of the last decade has been Guild Wars 2. Of all the mmorpgs I play, it's the one that's most successfully managed to integrate the genre's older, socially-reliant gameplay with modern, solo-oriented expectations.

But, once again, that's a whole other post.