that was opposing them. That became this big power struggle in the game. We had
these friendship webs, and as one of the things on this friendship web we were rating
who the most popular person was in the game by how many incoming friends they had.
And there was one woman who very rapidly went to the top of that list and she was the
one that actually founded the mafia. Because she had this incredible social network
already in place, and she leveraged that to become the head of the mafia. She became
very notorious. Some people loved her and thought she was helping the world; other
people thought she was the worst griefer in the whole game.
Was that something you felt you needed to put a stop to?
We had certain specific terms of service, so if somebody violated this terms of service
and somebody else reported it, then we had an obligation to go in and deal with it. These
mafia people were very, very good about just skirting the edge of that, and so they
almost never did anything that was over the boundaries of the terms of service. In other
words, you’re allowed to go in and make somebody an enemy. That’s just part of the
game design. Basically, you get the rewards for having lots of friends, and you lose
those rewards if you have more enemies. So, one of their tactics was they would decide
that there was a person that was doing something bad or had slighted them or had
scammed a newbie or whatever they didn’t like. Then they would put out the word
through the mafia network, and then fifty of them would descend on that person and all
declare him an enemy, which would remove all of the social things that he had earned.
That was the way that they were griefing. So it was actually within the game rules.
But we were following this quite a bit, and it was really interesting the social tur-
moil that this caused in the game. In some sense it was good; I think the game really
needed more of that. Because what it caused people to do was polarize, and get together
and talk about this, and what are they going to do. Basically having a common enemy on
either side caused people to bond together more strongly. A few weeks after this had
happened, something interesting happened. It wasn’t really clear if somebody was in
the mafia or not — you couldn’t really look at somebody and tell, and frequently they
wouldn’t let you know. And this wave of McCarthyism swept the world, with people
accusing somebody of being in the mafia: “No I’m not!” “Yes he is!” Things would be
whispered about various people. It was just kind of interesting how all these human
social behaviors manifested in this little microcosm.
I guess that’s one way to know when you’ve succeeded, when you’ve created a
system that allows those sorts of behaviors to happen.
At least you’ve enabled a certain amount of human nature to flow into it.
Previously you mentioned using metrics to assess the state of the game before
making adjustments. Did you find you could trust metrics more than the feed-
back from players?
I think they were both valuable. The metrics would give you no insight into intention or
motivation. They just say that more people are doing this today than tomorrow, and you
have no idea why. Then we would actually go and talk to people or look at message
boards and try to uncover the actual motivations behind the behaviors. Also, a lot of
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