Massive multiplayer online (MMOs) activities bring out paradoxes in human behavior. While people who like to hang with a close group of friends can mimic that in the MMO setting, you also find introverts (who are overwhelmed at an 8-person lunch) are able to coordinate 100-person raids. Guilds of players are huge, but the list of whom any player interacts with is much smaller. To parameterize these individual limits on preferred group size, we'll look at Dunbar's number.

The concept of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar's number, put simply, is that humans have a maximum social group size they can maintain. Dunbar suggested 150 people as a limit in our brains and a reason that we maintain specific sizes for social groups, villages, extended families, and social networks.

Ever-faithful Wikipedia covers Dunbar's number, though I favor the Monkeysphere take on it. Either way, it is a global human maximum.

Applying this global to a single organized activity, Christopher Allen analyzed "Ultima Online" guild sizes. In ( "The Dunbar Number as a Limit to Group Sizes"), he offers ranges for approaching business projects, paraphrased thusly:

1. 5-9: smallest viable group size
2. 9-12: breakdown (chasm) where group is either too large or too small
3. 25-40: best size for active groups where all members participate
4. 45-50: best size for large scale efforts requiring a large skill mix

In studying social networks, specifically game cultures, we need to look past our theoretical maximum capability to look at the social group size we most prefer for a given activity.

For example, while we may be able to maintain a roster of 150 friends, family, and acquaintances, that doesn't mean we want to invite them all to the same party, or play with them in our online guild. Instead, we're going to look at Dunbar Brackets-- the group size for a specific discrete activity with which we're most comfortable.

Applying Dunbar-like analysis to a highly interactive activity such as tabletop roleplaying, live action roleplaying, or social massive multiplayer online interaction, we find different Dunbar Brackets for different activities. Think of it as 'favorite party size'. Below your bracket range, you'll tend to think the group is too small and invite more people in. Above your range, you'll feel the event is too large or too crowded, and often suggest or act to reduce the size to what you consider 'more manageable'.

The simplest example is a dinner party. One person's crowd is another person's nightmare, which a third person might still think is too sparse. My suggestion is that certain activities draw people who share a specific Dunbar Range, because the activities themselves enforce those ranges.

'Introverts' tend to have a small bracket-- they prefer to be with from 1 to 3 other people, no more. These people are difficult to draw into a group activity because that moves them outside their preferred Dunbar Range.

'Tabletop RPG players', I suggest, have a Dunbar Range of 4-8 people, roughly corresponding to Allen's small-but-viable group. If the group is smaller than 4, they tend to invite more players. At 8 or so, they start to think the group is getting too large or too unwieldy.

This is the primary utility of Dunbar Brackets-- determining an individual's comfort level. If the group is below what you like as a minimum, you will tend to invite more people and work to increase group size. You want the party to be big enough to hit your lower comfort zone.

'LARPers' (live action roleplayers) likely have a wider Dunbar Range, of 5-40 people. And typical LARPs range from a dozen to many tens of people. The activity has a customary group size, and it therefore attracts people who are comfortable in a group that size. Nothing novel there, but looking at it in terms of Dunbar Ranges is useful for estimating who the best target audience may be.

For example, LARPers are up for playing RPGs, because of the lower end of the range overlap, but not all RPGers are willing to scale up to LARP-sized activities. At the same time, some LARPers have a Dunbar Range that starts higher, perhaps 12-40 people; at smaller tabletop sizes, they aren't as engaged and thus less likely to play.

Tackling massive multiplayer online (MMO) activities, we first find that there is no single definition of an MMO. Further, for looking at Dunbar Ranges for active play, we have to exclude 'guild size' as a criteria because guilds are often a potential social network, not the same as the group you are directly playing with. Alarge group may not part of your social network, though they are part of your resource network. So a defined social organization such as a 'Guild' does not necessarily mean they are part of your social interaction group. I'll define the interaction group as the people in the MMO with whom you are socially engaging in-- typically the roleplaying part, but also issues like planning and strategizing.

A large group raid would, in theory, socially overloads the neocortex of a low Dunbar individual and thus have a hard time finding enough 'extroverts' to work. Yet very large raids are also very common. This is clearly because, once you leave the upper level of your Dunbar Range, you can abstract people and deal with them in pure tactical terms. The more you can abstract and tokenize your group into 'units' rather than 'people', the larger group size you can work with for a tactical goal. This is because you are not treating them as a social network. So in analyzing comfortable ranges, it's important to differentiate social from tactical.

A good metric for MMORPGs is adventure party size. Even this covers a wide variety. Just within one MMORPG (Puzzle Pirates), you can solo, be part of a 12-person ship, join a 40-crew ship, or take part in multi-ship fleet actions. So there are multiple activity levels that people can join into, depending on their comfortable Dunbar Range.

We offer two uses for Dunbar Brackets beyond simple academic debate. The first is for you, the individual. If you ever wondered why you tend to find some online, roleplaying, or social activities accommodating and others off-putting, we suggest looking at social group size as one of the likely factors.

In essence, we replace awkward labels like Introvert/Extrovert with a more nuanced set of Brackets, which each person can use to self-study what they want from a group.

The second use is that online community designers need to account for both social/roleplaying group sizes as well as guild/resource network sizes, and realize that there is a range of player types mixing within the two. Therefore, any MMO needs to have multiscale design, so that solos and small group play as well as large raid-level activities are available.

Put simply, don't assume players will all want to join large guilds, but avoid game balance issues that would be broken if large guilds arise. By allowing small group behavior, you will have people with low Dunbar Brackets joining. By realizing that large scale activities will occur, particularly on a tactical level, you can avoid mob disruption of the game setting.

Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net