Saturday, September 26, 2009

The Reciprocity Fallacy







Verilazic said...

I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical. Well, I believe that it exists and works. I just don't think it works in all cases, and that many people tend to remember the negative cases much more readily than the positive cases.

And how do you harness this? More importantly, how do you encourage it?

evizaer said...

You don't encourage the reciprocity itself, you encourage activities that engender reciprocity. You facilitate gift-giving. You give people bonuses for being in groups. You reward guild membership through guild crafting and guild-wide XP gain from certain behaviors. You can even force people to find a player who is a master at a craft in order to rank up that craft.

Atlantica Online does this well.

Verilazic said...

Ah. I was looking at it 1-dimensionally. I thought you were only talking about instances of straight gift-giving, when you're talking more about encouraging interactions that aren't equally beneficial in the strict sense. That makes more sense to me now.

Dblade said...

Your mileage may vary on this. I have helped many a newbie who did not stay to play the game to pay it forward, instead they left for reasons unknown. The desire is real, but by the time you can repay you usually either are invested in the game or quit it for other reasons.

Tesh said...

Atlantica Online has a handful of mechanics that encourage this sort of "angel veteran" gift giving. Of course, vets get something for their efforts (XP or loot, usually), but the rewards to the newbie are good enough to make it "better" in their eyes. (The relative worth is higher, even if the absolute worth isn't; in WoW terms, 10 gold goes a long way for a new player, while it's pocket change for a veteran.)

It's proven to be a decent way to get players interacting and foster positive exchanges and a habit of magnanimity.

Wolfshead said...

Nice article! I've been reading Robert Cialdini's book in the past month while doing research for a project I'm working on.

I think designers should be utilizing this trait to help encourage more cooperation in MMOs. The more cooperation we have, the more social interdependence we have, the more that the player bonds with the MMO creating a cohesive experience for all.

The challenge for MMO designers is to find some way to quantify and reward "niceness", "generosity", etc. It's surely in their best interest.

For example outside of the intrinsic benefits of leading a guild what does a guildleader get out of the experience for all their hard work and heartache?

MMO designers really need to find more concrete ways to appreciate the contribution of good players. Seems to me that the current crop of MMO devs don't bother to think outside of the box. They turn their noses at the thought of "community" as a "social experiment" (Jeff Kaplan's words). Yet they are quick to claim that their MMOs are some kind of uplifting "social networking phenomena" (Mike Morhaime at BlizzCon 2009.

Excellent article! Keep it up :)

Anonymous said...

How is the tendency towards reciprocity a fallacy? You can argue that it is an error of values but it doesn't seem like an error of reasoning.