Not easy. Could use a manual to give me some solid understanding of what affects what in centers. I feel as though I made a good run as an animal shelter thingy, but I want to see a manual for it. (Which, as you might guess, inclines me to say that it was a good game: I just couldn’t get a grip on the play in 5 minutes.)

I can imagine that players only benefit from ‘massively multi-player’ game in a rather roundabout ways. Such games provide them a wider population to build their intimate circle of <10 players and their functional social circle of <80 players. Big games = big ‘dating’ pools.

The millions of other players who don’t make it into the friends circle are classified as outsiders. Historically, such a status means that they are seen as little more than animals that meander around the environment, to be killed, hunted, used or perhaps eradicated if they are a pest. From this tribal perspective, it is quite reasonable that players with a full social circle wish to build walls and create their own private utopia. Once you are married, Match.com is replaced by the private family blog.

The real problem here is content design. For whatever reason, a lot of content design in MMORPGs seems to be very linear. Areas seem to be built purposely so that people have to move “through” them to the goal. Now don’t get me wrong, I like a good dungeon crawl as good as any player, but at the same time, if you’re going to support multiple groups of people in an area, you can’t have one big linear path or they’ll end up running into each other and generally getting in the way of each other’s gameplay.

In a “traditional diku” game, without instancing, I would expect that content would be built with multiple entry/exit points and multiple self-contained sub-areas so that it could support several discrete groups of people. This allows them to interact without hampering each other’s play.