Four million active bloggers. 25 million Usenet users. 10's of millions of online gamers. Millions of MMOG players (e.g., see Sir Bruce's numbers). Do these mediums differ by their social networks? Do MMOGs bring something special to the social software table (see Christopher Allen's Tracing the Evolution of Social Software for a historical perspective)?
Adina Levin recently asked "why do we need another term" (reprinted Oct 18 on Many2Many). Implicit to this question is another question, how are the different incarnations of social software, different?
People who’ve been pioneering online collaboration say that they’ve seen this all before: on Plato, in MUDs, on the Well, in Usenet, in academic writing for decades... Is there anything new ...The answer, I think, is yes. And the measure of the answer is the internet and the web.
One difference may lie with the composition of their "network of networks" - as Adina points out it isn't just about scale, it is that different sized communities can co-flourish and overlap within a single interconnected system. Another might involve a links-based culture ("addressability and groupforming") that worships - on the one hand - the freedom of content combinatorics, yet which structures it by way of an individual instinct towards the shiny and the attractive: from nest-primping comes our decorative and social boundary defining impulses.
Adina then thrusts the question of the experience of multiplayer games and MMOGs into the social software scene:
There’s a generation of innovation and experimentation that is new, that’s going on around us, and that’s worthy of a name. The language would be poorer if we didn’t have a way to group Flickr, LiveJournal, del.icio.us, Technorati, and Audioscrobbler, or to tell these things apart from earlier generation mainframe and LAN-based hothouse systems.
...I know that multi-player games are an integral part of the story, but someone else will have to work on that chapter. The things that speak to me intellectually and emotionally are those that build relationships (LiveJournal), build shared art and culture (Flickr, AudioScrobber, Wikipedia). Shoot-em-ups and D&D fantasies don't speak to me, so I don't know the communities or vocabulary.
Perhaps the contribution of multiplayer games is a particularly promiscuous and pervasive content creation culture. A culture where modding is more than just about content creation, but is the product of community, collaboration, and a shared value system of production spanning inspiration through validation.
Another difference, perhaps, may lie with a comment Ted made over on The Better Mousetrap, there he mentioned:
At last year's SOP, Alex Macris pointed out that there are only three things to reward: player skill, player time, and player external resources (dollars). Tim's pointing out that you can also reward luck.
Is there a fifth reward? Do MMOGs reward a social stickiness: socialization charged by game play? Is there a qualitatively different kind of cooperation and interaction that takes place in MMOGs than in other kinds of social software systems? Perhaps spiked with a powerful mixture of acting and imagination.
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