Lost Ark and Friendship in Online Games
Lost Ark's Open Seas of Possibilities
Friendship has always felt challenging to pin down conceptually. We know when we have one but they are so often implicit and rarely declared. Some are fleeting while others are lasting, some friendships are a gentle breeze over a calm ocean while others are unmitigated disasters that thrive on turbulence. Regardless, these friendships are full of meaning particular to shared moments developed across time with people that somehow resonate with our very being. When I started playing online games in the early 2000s in the millions of World of Warcraft players I found many of these meaningful friendships in little time, and I’m not alone. Across my years playing WoW I rolled through various guilds and servers like a renegade katamari, picking up folks who connected with me through some unplaceable affinity along the way, and a surprising amount of these friendships persist to this day nearly 20 years later.
Now though, friendship has changed in online games. I don’t think it’s possible to attribute this change to online games alone, as social media sites like Facebook have contributed to the increasingly muddy idea of what a friend can be. But since the early days of massively multiplayer online games, there have been some observable trends away from the conditions that helped players produce strong friendships and communities in games. In 2016 Nicole Crenshaw and Bonnie Nardi examined how players perceived there be less need for community and collaboration as new social features like a ‘group finder’ were added to the game (2016). As games have added more robust and encompassing social systems, somewhere along the way the tendency to add and refine systems undercut the core experience that many MMO players wanted out of their games.
Last month a popular Korean MMO, Lost Ark, launched in Europe and North America. As is standard for our era of online gaming it uses various layers of matchmaking systems, and while guilds are still a part of the game, it hasn’t been necessary to interact with another player beyond explaining certain boss fight mechanics. Even this is rare in the grand scope of the game. You have a friends list in Lost Ark, but these friends are largely an incentive to earn one of the game’s many currencies. Early into the game’s release players discovered that you could earn Amethyst Shards, a limited currency used to buy a range of cosmetic items, by having 50 friends on your friends list. The result of this incentivization of friendship wasn’t that players attempted to cultivate any, let alone 50, meaningful relationships. Instead players found the path of least resistance to their coveted rewards: chat spam.
Figure 1. “Add me”
The chat of Lost Ark’s open seas became flooded with begging, bargaining, and trades for friends list spots - transactional and incentivized operations to maximize the number of Amethyst Shards you could receive. It’s not impossible that a meaningful friendship developed from this, but it doesn’t seem any more likely for this kind of incentive to produce a real friendship than any of the other activities in the game either, despite it being linked to the friends list itself.
For a portion of Lost Ark’s release I’ve been running a guild with a few friends that has been open to any other players. Despite welcoming them to the guild, players are often silent in these channels. As design conventions have changed we’ve become habituated to requiring the bare minimum social interaction to make our way through a game, even in a game genre that was built on a plurality of players - where the nostalgia for the high-points of MMO gameplay is often directly a product of memories we shared with people that we became quite close with. While games have a long history of toxic aspects, I suspect that as players became more instrumental to each other it became easier to lash out at others while we play.
It's likely that there’s no reverting to systems that are less streamlined than current matchmaking systems in games. It’s apparent that online games hold onto their players and make money by being convenient to play and getting players into the action with as little hassle as possible. Asking designers to deliberately reduce the social conveniences of their games is a big ask, and even if companies would do this, players have become so used to being matched together quickly and treating other players like instruments or obstacles to their own amusement that this strategy would likely push players to other games with more convenient social systems anyway. While I would like to see a strategy like this and what it does to toxicity in a game, it is unlikely to happen.
So what can be done? It falls into the hands of players who long for those old connections to really make an effort to develop strong friendships in online games. This isn’t an easy thing, though. Part of the magic of WoW’s early days was that folks who may have had a harder time socializing in other spaces managed to find themselves among friends anyway. Socializing was almost a requirement to accomplish standard tasks within the game, so it was natural to encounter other players and to build rapport with them. The friends list itself and using an incentive to get players on each others’ lists doesn’t produce the same bond-building interactions. It’s also worth noting that there is a general apprehension of others among players that has only grown over time, and if the average general opinion of other players is that they’re probably toxic in some way, players are less likely to reach out and open that first dialogue. There is a warranted fear of what a closer interaction might produce, and it’s not uncommon for many players to minimize chat or to mute other players by default when possible for fear of what other players might say.
Most games aren’t built to produce meaningful friendships anymore, even if the nostalgia for that kind of connection is part of what keeps us coming back to play them, and many players aren’t open to meeting other people through games even though games are driven by more social systems than ever before. Fostering positive social experiences is an important step for addressing the challenges of games culture, and there is potential for creating positive experiences by socializing within games, but it’s largely up to players who are interested in forging those connections to strive to make them happen. Otherwise the potential for social connection largely caps out at earning currency in a game we’ll probably stop playing in a month anyway. Ah, the memories!
REFERENCES
Nicole Crenshaw and Bonnie Nardi. “‘It was more than just a game, it was the community’: Social affordances in online games. 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2016.
