My GDC presentation, The Loner, was a reprisal of a talk I gave a couple of years ago at AGDC.  I’ve updated the slides in the sidebar (convenient link here) to point to the new slides, which are cleaner, neater, and offer some additional information.  Massively covers the talk here. The talk wasn’t very full, as it somehow escaped being in the Conference-at-a-glance guide or on the conference overview boards, but the response was pretty good.  Here, SW:TOR’s board warriors took my talk and made a poll asking ‘What Kind of Loner are you?’

One of the things that I talked about in my talk was the fact that a lot of people were loners because they could not find good social circles for them to fit into – they couldn’t find guilds that would have them (the Unworthy), they were part of guilds that shattered (the Adrift), or they were generally afraid of or disdainful of joining a guild, ostensibly because they didn’t like the commitment, but perhaps even moreso that they were trepidatious about finding themselves enmeshed in a group of mouthbreathing idiots who were perpetually embroiled in guild drama of the worst kind.  I suggested that finding a way for players to do a better job of finding like-minded people to guild up with was a sore spot ripe for design experimentation by an enterprising design team.

Today, Bioware announced our little bit of design experimentation in this area – and yes, I sorely wish I could have announced it in my talk.  Our preguild program is a neat experiment with several goals in mind – helping us distribute launch day load, for example – but the most important to me is that of helping players find like-minded guildmates.  I think most players (and designers) underestimate how much flavor an MMO takes from the people that you meet.  If you play WoW with a bunch of high school l337sp34k3A5, you’re going to have a vastly different experience than if you run a dungeon with people who like to quote shakespeare, or the people who like to roleplay as a star trek away team, or the people who like to ERP.

Finding the right climate is so important to whether or not an MMO proves as sticky, but right now, the state of the art for MMOs is hoping that players serendipitously find a compatible group.  Here’s hoping we manage to move that state of the art forward just a little bit.