Building Durable, Effective In Game Social Structures

[Mbando]

What makes for effective, durable online social structures? How do we create guilds, settlements, and larger structures that don’t fall apart? While most of us long-time gamers likely have some ideas from experience, there may be value in extrapolating from the scientific literature on military resilience and readiness, at the unit level. Real life military social structures are different in some very important ways from online social structures (life-threat being the most obvious), but thinking through what coordinated, cohesive groups handle adversity and grow, and what supports their readiness and effectiveness may help us think through and implement best practices for our guilds and settlements.

My review of the literature shows the following unit level factors:

Resilience:

· Pro-social behavior and teamwork

· Communication and problem-solving skills and habits

· Cohesion [both affective cohesion (high levels of mutual social support, comradeship love), and instrumental cohesion (committed to the group's goals and tasks]

· Unit leadership and positive command climate (leader competency,

Readiness:

· Personal/Family well-being (gives you space to commit to and focus on unit tasks)

· Cohesion

· Confidence (both self-confidence and confidence in each other)

· Unit leadership and positive command climate

· Shared ethos (group agreement on values and ethics)

Some thoughts:

· There’s significant overlap of factors that support resilience and readiness. That’s a goods thing, and can us a sense of where we might profitably “double-dip” in building and maintaining our social structures.

· Communication & problem-solving skills: While this factor draws heavily from the skill-set of members, this is a trainable set of skills/habits. Leaders and members can make an explicit choice to talk through problems, to use both directness and politeness to avoid toxic behavior (e.g. passive aggressive behavior), bring problems out to be explicitly addressed. When you see a communication failure or social problem, don’t let it go and hope it goes away—address it.

· Cohesion: there’s a lot of research on the positive side of cohesion: hard work and shared sacrifice in service to group goals builds cohesion. Some of my field research points to the darker side of cohesion: negative appraisals and group judgments can be a powerful incentive for members to change behaviors*. If someone acts selfishly, group condemnation of the behavior is necessary, but the member must be allowed a way to redeem/recover their standing in the group.

· Leadership. In the literature, in addition to leader competence, leader concern for the welfare of members has been a strong predictor of resilience and readiness. Effective leaders are able to place group goals as the highest good while demonstrating concern and care for members.

· Pro-social/helping behavior: This is a serious challenge in MMO’s because of mechanics. Level gaps and game-play dispersion(PVE, PVP, Gear/Faction grinding) tend to pull teams apart—helping a guildie may often mean hurting yourself (in terms of time sinks). PFO’s design may help ameliorate this—there’s no grind, so I don’t need to worry about stopping my grind to help someone else do their grind; and regardless of your playstyle, it will have to be integrated into SS vs. SS play—you can’t opt out.

· Shared ethos: You had better think long and hard about how you merge groups, because if you merge to get numbers, but you have a serious gap in terms of values, you’ve got a huge fault line just waiting for a blow to shatter you back into pieces.

*Please see Marcellino, William (2104). “Talk Like a Marine: USMC linguistic acculturation and civil–military argument.” Discourse Studies 16, no. 3. Also see: Marcellino, W. & F. Tortorello (in press), “I Don’t Think I Would Have Recovered: Resilience Among U.S. Marines.” Armed Forces & Society.

[Lifedragn]

I would like to add the prioritization of Fun vs. Winning.

Having fun together helps build strong bonds. Winning can certainly be fun, but it is not required for a good group to have fun. A group that forms social bonds based on fun will hold much better and be able to rebuild in the face of loss than a social group that builds bonds based on winning. That first loss would devastate the latter group and shatter them.

Additionally, sacrificing fun for strategic advances to secure victory is very likely to cause players to tire of the game and burn out more quickly.

I am not advocating seeking a losing position. If you were starving and thirsting and could have either water or dry food today and get both three days from now, you should be prioritizing the water for today. You need both, but you can go longer without food than you can without water.

I am merely stating that for a game we play as entertainment, the Fun is our water and the Victory is our food. We need both, but we need the water far more frequently to remain sustained.

[Nihimon]

Mbando, thanks for sharing that with us. There's some extremely good advice in there, and it's extremely helpful to have it stated directly - makes it much easier to keep in mind and act on.

[Pax Bringslite]

Great stuff. Never becomes irrelevant to review.

[T7V Jazzlvraz]

Fascinating article in your footnote.

[Mbando]

Lifedragn wrote:

I would like to add the prioritization of Fun vs. Winning.

Having fun together helps build strong bonds. Winning can certainly be fun, but it is not required for a good group to have fun. A group that forms social bonds based on fun will hold much better and be able to rebuild in the face of loss than a social group that builds bonds based on winning. That first loss would devastate the latter group and shatter them.

Additionally, sacrificing fun for strategic advances to secure victory is very likely to cause players to tire of the game and burn out more quickly.

Thanks for posting Lifedragn :)

I'd like to respectfully qualify your claim here. I would suggest that neither a social closeness nor in-game success are higher or better ends. Rather, these are two possible value orientations, and what matters is whether there's a values match with members. It's the "Shared ethos" dimension of readiness--if you have a group where the leadership is oriented towards in-game success, but a large chunk of the membership is oriented towards social closeness, you likely have a much less ready, potentially more brittle organization. I think it's clear where you fall on that spectrum :)

[Mbando]

Thanks Nihimon and Bringslite :)

Jazzlvraz, I spent 6 months in 2012 embedded with a Marine Corps unit for that research, trying to understand how Marine officers are acculturated. Cohesion is a particular interest, and really in my focus in that research, but I'm also very interested in resilience at the personal, family, and unit level.