Social software considerations

[DP]

When I pointed this article out to Ron, he suggested I post it here. This article focuses on groups on the Internet and how they behave (and have always behaved) in ways the designers of "social software" (which includes the Web technologies of sites like the Forge) don't expect.

If you're developing a "community" for your game or something that more approaches an online game, this article contains some fantastic insights.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

[lumpley]

Anybody serious about the Forge oughta read this.  If it were me I'd put it in a sticky in Site Discussion.

Fantastic insights indeed.

-Vincent

[Bankuei]

Hi Vincent,

I concur, it certainly points to the conditioning issues I've brought up before...especially the tendency towards blind acceptance(religiousity) or blind rejection(identify and villify enemies), both without understanding, especially with GNS as a focal point.

Chris

[lumpley]

Hey Chris.

It's interesting.  The group-destructive religiosity and vilification of outsiders are like heads/tails with the group-constructive focus and commitment.

If this guy's right, we can fairly understand Ron's and Clinton's moderator roles like this:

We, the rabble*, are inclined by human nature to destroy the Forge, using religious veneration of GNS, vilification of non-Forgers, and sex.  Ron and Clinton* have to keep a reign on those, but leave their constructive counterparts -- building on GNS' successes, high standards for participation, dynamic collaborative relationships -- free.

That's an interesting balancing act.

Especially, how do those of us who really really dig GNS reign in ourselves and others of us when we slip and treat GNS as dogma?

-Vincent

*In "the rabble" I include Ron and Clinton when they aren't being moderators.  In "Ron and Clinton" I include all of us who're committed to the Forge's success, when we're acting on that commitment, but especially moderators.  Lest I commit religiosity.

[Bankuei]

Hi Vincent,

Actually, I consider it both ways, the simple common denominator between the two being blind acceptance or blind rejection without any understanding.  So, pro-GNS or anti-GNS without understanding are both counter to the Forge in general: Understanding.  

You can see several examples where folks have had to correct the pro-GNS folks as much as the anti-GNS ones, and that such corrections have stepped on more than one ego and turned a few individuals into anti-Forge in general.  

Of course, if we spent time trying to coddle egos instead of stepping back and examining the situation, we'd pretty much be in the same state as any other roleplaying community, swirling in then empty circles of debate between roll-playing and role-playing, going with whatever subject happens to be popular at the moment(pro/anti D20, Savage Worlds, White Wolf, etc.).

The common Forge issues that recur enough to be named are:

1) Pro/anti GNS w/o understanding, no real discussion occurs(see Ron's GNS misconceptions as good examples)

2) Attention seeking, usually in the form of some strong statements which are not backed up by any real logic or observation

3) Folks getting their egos all bent out of shape when being called out on #1 or #2 as unacceptable means of discourse; which immediately dubbed, "They're not listening to me!  They're elitist!" because the individual was requested to provide more explaination to back up their statements, or to simply step back and acknowledge what is really being said(as opposed to what they've projected on it).

Granted, all of us have gotten a little emotional and snarky(me included), but I think the key point is that we try to slim that down as much as possible and Ron & Clinton's Iron Fists(benevolent dictatorship rocks!) have made it easy to sift the chaff out.

What would "destroy" the Forge would be the point when meaningful discourse has become impossible, due to the amount of pure emotionalism,  based on blind acceptance or rejection.  This is why most other sites or email lists fail to provide as much solid outcome or indepth discussion because folks get too bogged down in flame wars pro or against something, without actually looking into it, too caught up on pissing contests and ego wars.

And this is simply the online aspect of such conditioning.  Stepping into actual play and social interaction amongst real live groups, not even internet ones, is probably a field day for behavioral psychologists everywhere :P

Chris

(edited for clarity)

[Jason Lee]

Huh...

I guess I'm supposed to be talking about the Forge, but I think I see some similarities between social software and rpg systems.  Given, social software provides a medium for social interation and rpg systems are a structure within the medium of social interation (so they definately aren't the same), but these few points (and the related text) have some interesting parallels (for me anyway):

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.

You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

Not having fun playing in your group, but refusing to quit?

He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.

As GM, ever had to try to get everyone to stop chattering so you could play?

1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.

The system needs to take into account player goals and how the players will interact with it.

3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.

Group fun above individual goals, game balance, etc.

*****

As far as the Forge stuff goes...very interesting; especially the scale issues which we see pop up in indie design a lot.

[John Kim]

If this guy's right, we can fairly understand Ron's and Clinton's moderator roles like this:

We, the rabble*, are inclined by human nature to destroy the Forge, using religious veneration of GNS, vilification of non-Forgers, and sex.  Ron and Clinton* have to keep a reign on those, but leave their constructive counterparts -- building on GNS' successes, high standards for participation, dynamic collaborative relationships -- free.

Well, the article speaks from the approach of designing software rather than having human moderators.  On the one hand, moderators are smarter than software.  However, the problem with manual moderators is that as the group gets larger, either (1) controlling things eats up more and more of Ron and Clinton's time, or (2) they do less and less moderating.  

The article says that the important thing is the group within the group.  For the Forge, this would include top posters like Mike Holmes, Valamir, Paul Czege, M.J. Young, Gordon Landis, and Marco.  The article suggests that these core members should be given more power of a sort than a newly-joined members.  

I have certainly seen this in action from rec.games.frp.advocacy.  Previous conversations could be shut down by a prolific and controversial new poster, like Shane Dunbar for example.  Now, rgfa was unmoderated and in retrospect you can call it a failure.  However, I think that is a little unfair.  RGFA had a fairly thriving heyday of at least 3 years (1995-1998) which is longer than The Forge has been around at all.  

That's an interesting balancing act.

Especially, how do those of us who really really dig GNS reign in ourselves and others of us when we slip and treat GNS as dogma?

It's a good question.  RGFA started to decline after 1998, which was after the Threefold became an established theory -- and though I don't like to admit it, the Threefold being static (via my FAQ) may have been a part of it.  A lot of arguments descended into being "The Threefold is right" vs "The Threefold is wrong" -- rather than developing further or better understanding.  The Forge seems to be doing better in this regard, by at least having more topics of theory discussion -- like, say, the Lumpley Principle.  

Based on academia, I would say that the ideal would be if there were multiple theories which could potentially compete.  So rather than a single all-encompassing theory (i.e. GNS+more) which you have to either accept as a whole or reject, there are a bunch of principles.  Someone can say that he agrees with A and C but not with B.

[Valamir]

Now, this pulls against the cardinal virtue of ease of use. But ease of use is wrong. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at the situation, because you've got the Necker cube flipped in the wrong direction. The user of social software is the group, not the individual.

The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group. If the ease of use is only calculated from the user's point of view, it will be difficult to defend the group from the "group is its own worst enemy" style attacks from within.

This entire article is extremely good reading.  But the above is the part I found most profound, because to me it speaks directly to the issue of Forge Jargon.  We've had numerous threads and debates and discussions about the jargon making things opaque for new users.  I've had involved discussions on RPG.Net where I assert that the Jargon is too opaque for the casual reader to browse and then begin critiquing...because they don't fully understand that.  Some suggested and I had partially given credence to the idea that the Jargon might have become more of an obstacle than a facilitator.

But now, perhaps I see a different angle to the issue outlined above.  The Jargon may well be be impeding the ease of use of the individual...but the user here should really be the Group...

[Valamir]

And posted seperately, because I wanted to keep the ideas distinct, is this notion.  I don't know that we've reached this point yet...but I think we can see it on the horizon and probably should give some thought to how to handle it when the horizon becomes the foreground.

4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

This mention seemed to me to be interesting...if only for the ease of implementation.

And then my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.

Interestingly, Mutual Funds have the exact same problem with scale (for somewhat different reasons) and use the exact same solution.  When a fund gets too big for the manager to handle...its closed, to be reopened at some point in the future.

[Marco]

I've actually been batting around articles of that nature for some time. I find the asynchronous post-re-post method good for a sort of leisurely exploration/presentation of ideas--but very poorly suited to their argumentation (where-in I wind up with a logic tree that either assumes someone is holding a position for purposes of argument or I do a series of PM's that are very short (single point) and I have to deal with the perception that I'm going to wind up trying to catch the correspondent in a logical contradiction so they feel they have to argue *everything*--or at least give a highly and often ambiguously qualified opinions).

Whew.

That said, I think some phenomeonal things have been done here. The temporary "get to know you thread" was a good way of getting a lot of social stuff out in a limited period of time.

I also think that the level of moderation is sufficient if it can be sustained. I'm not sure it *can* be sustained--but thus far it, IMO has done pretty well.

I've suggested before--and will again--targeted on-line logged/moderated chat sessions. The technical solution exists to have a moderator, to post the results of the discussion, etc. I'd have found something like that useful for situations where I've said something three different ways and it still seems like it's not clear.

I don't believe the fanaticism/anti-fanaticism is likely to really destroy The Forge--but I do think that it's very damaging to the discussion of RPG/GNS theory here.  I think Vincent hit the crucial issue right on the head.

-Marco

[Mike Holmes]

Based on academia, I would say that the ideal would be if there were multiple theories which could potentially compete. So rather than a single all-encompassing theory (i.e. GNS+more) which you have to either accept as a whole or reject, there are a bunch of principles. Someone can say that he agrees with A and C but not with B.

But I would say at this level that this is a competing theory. That is, few people will argue that RPG players don't have priorites that sometimes differ. This seems given across all theories. So the theories will have some similarities to them. So when you say that some people accept or reject some part of the currently most accepted theory, you are talking about competeing theories, IMO. At least the same sort of competition you see in academia.

I'd say that the importance of Marco to us is that he represents an honest attempt at alternate theories (and I daresay yourself in some cases). To the extent that we here argue against your theories genuinely, seeking to refine the theory rather than simply upholding it as dogma, we're doing exactly what you're talking about. Without opposition, nobody can tell if our side is honest, and knowledge only creeps forward if at all.

Now, does that mean that there could be more honest opposition, and less dogmatic participants here? Sure could. The problem is in applying the academic standard to the discussion. By requiring that people understand the theory as it stands before being allowed to attack it, we make it less likely that people will want to be on the opposing side. Not surprising from a social POV. It's easy for me to be a member, I'm on the popular side. But less easy for others, who will suffer from dogma that does get slung, and may even take refutation of their theories personally when it's not intended.

Communication is imperfect, and so are we. Given that, we have to take preventative measures. The advantage to the bar to entry being high is that only persons like yourself, or Marco do stick around. We don't have to deal long term with people who aren't honestly dedicated to creating greater understanding, but just promoting their own viewpoint from the "opposition". And for those who are "on the bandwagon" with the current theory, and there are some to be sure, I think that the central group spends a lot of effort censuring our own side so that people like Marco don't flee from social pressures that militate against making for a better theory. YMMV.

Again, imperfect, and it's harder to prevent the insiders from mucking things up than it is the outsiders. But that's just a fact of life. The problem becomes the aformentioned increase in size. But we've seen that at times, and we've noted what the solution is: an increase in central members. So, when a Walt Freitag, or Jonathan Walton, or a Shreyas Sampat or any of a number of people display the right willingness to debate honestly, we encourage them as much as possible to become part of that central group.

But when it comes down to it, people only have so much time. So it's left to people like myself with a lot of spare time to do what we can in many cases. I feel that I need to put a bumpersticker in my sig line saying "How's my Debating?" with a phone number so that people who think I'm doing it wrong can call me. FWIW, if you see me getting out of line, let me know (and many of you already do).

Basically, if you understand the difference between debate and dogma, please, please, please, become a regular poster. You are who the site needs, IMO. And if you have an alternate theory, even if only slightly, add three more pleases to that. It's only by rational debate that we will ever move on.

Ron has said that he's waiting for the day that his theory is replaced by something else. I take him for his word on that, though I think that problems with egos make it so that not everyone thinks it's true. There's really only one way to find out, however, and that's to understand the theory, develop a new idea, and throw your idea into the ring and find out for yourself.

Mike