Brian> To further Bob’s comments, I winced when I read the article, and I winced again when you called me out on it. Afaik, it’s the one place in the piece where Dan misquoted or misunderstood us. And to spin Bob’s comment a bit, my point was that while the social nature of the games is what makes an MMO distinct from a single-player game, and while we know game companies are mining and analyzing their MMO data, we have yet to meet a game company that is doing social analysis qua social analysis on the data they have in hand. Such a company might well exist — but we haven’t seen it yet. I hope that in this context, the comment is not considered semi-insulting to anyone, let alone potential clients.

Grinless> scottj is dead on saying people “want and do play solo in a multiplayer environment”. People do seem to want socialization — they aren’t playing a single player game — but it doesn’t mean they want to group. This is a main theme of Nic’s paper, “Alone Together” (available on the PlayOn blog, or directly from http://www.parc.xerox.com/research/publications/files/5599.pdf). People enjoy the audience and spectacle and the aliveness of a shared social space, even though they spend much of their time playing solo. I also suspect there’s a spectrum thing going on — some people would prefer a crummy group to soloing, and others would prefer soloing to even the best group. Being on the grouping end myself, I was surprised that most players are at the soloing end. Go figure.

Brian, don’t believe everything you read. (We’re not THAT arrogant.) Daniel did a nice job on the article overall, but unfortunately he misquoted Eric in that last line. What Eric actually said was “despite the fact that game companies have masses of data on what their customers actually do together, we have yet to meet a company that really mines it.”

But that might not make as exciting reading as Daniel’s version.

PS, if you would like a copy of the paper on avatar interaction design that Raph mentions, please drop me a line (thanks, Raph!).

Now, stop worrying about socialisation and start worrying more about gameplay. Casual player, the time-restricted kind, have time for very minimal social interaction but they do want to make sure their scarce time are rewarded with good gameplay.

The social side of MMO is a bonus to most people, nothing more, they come and stick in a MMO for the gameplay.

Imagine how annoying Monopoly would be if, in order to play, you actually had to have 4 people per “player”, and only one could roll the dice and move the piece, only one could buy properties, only one could build houses, and only one could collect rent. And if one of those people kept screwing up or left, you couldn’t do that particular function anymore.

What you are referring to are folks that want and do play solo within a multiplayer environment. That multiplayer environment still has socialization/community elements, such as a player economy, arbitration of disputes between players, etc.

Most of the market, the elusive casual players, doesn’t care about socialisation. Im tempted to say: “At all”…

Stop following the “socialisation” sirens call and face the fact: Most MMO player want and do play solo.

Likewise, I don’t mean to bag on the PlayOn folks – that stuff they do is pretty neat.

But I do betcha every article written about them forever gives me drama, as it hits something on that list…

Having spent quite a lot of time looking at what they accomplished and what they have researched, I can tell you that the “grouping = socialization” summary is pretty far off from what they actually say and believe. Bob Moore, for example, can talk at length about ways to make avatars more compelling using fairly simple tricks — he presented on this at AGC. The work they did examining socialization patterns goes a lot deeper too. I’d link to the papers except it’s 6:58am on a Sunday at a hotel with my family and we’re going down to breakfast now.

PS, the companies could easily do what PlayOn is doing, if they just committed to it. Sometimes it takes an external group doing something for the value to be recognized.