Skype and collaboration

A friend of mine plays a "free" massively multi-player on-line game called Travian. The game allows alliances to form but only up to a limited size. The players who organize on a larger scale than the in-game ally system allows for will dominate the play and beat any alliances that fail to organize and coordinate sufficiently well.

Skype is mandatory for serious participation in this game. Literally, they won't let you join most alliances without it. The players spontaneously choose leadership, form various discussion groups, and appoint task groups as needed using multi-user text chat, message boards, e-mail and phone conferences. The degree of spontaneous innovation is interesting. Custom web sites are used and research is done into game mechanics with results posted and argued over. Meta game tools like bots that track historical growth patterns for villages broken out by player and alliance and so on are available for free, paid for (hopefully) with embedded ads.

All being fair in war, every alliance is quite concerned with operational security. Accounts are free, easy to create, and anonymous. An unscrupulous player could use an extra account to join an enemy alliance and funnel information back to his home alliance. Operations are planned with this in mind: need to know is used, and planning is delegated to a large number of small separate teams with central strategic direction but local tactical control. Each sub-team keeps it's detail's secret to minimize exposure.

Travian rewards carefully thought out operations with extremely precise timing across large numbers of players. The best alliances achieve scheduling accurate to the second, precisely orchestrating surgical strikes launched over hours and days timed exactly to arrive in successive seconds to maximize damage and effect and minimize the opportunity for the defense to react. That's an impressive level of precision in planning and timing for a self-organizing entity.

For minimal cost other than player's time they achieve large scale organization through hierarchical segmented decisions - large scale/strategic done centrally by a small group, small scale/tactical done via a distributed network of multiple teams, teams changing and scaling up and down as needed to address challenges.

Participating in a game from beginning to end, supporting your meta-alliance's shot at the win and trying to stomp out any opponents attempt to win until finally somebody wins - takes about 9 months. The game is arranged so that by spending a little cash you can be much more effective. Realistically, if you want to be good - to grow fast enough to be a threat and to be able to defend yourself sufficiently - then you will need to spend a few bucks a month, maybe up to $10 or $15 if you're really into it. Being really good is also going to require frequent updating and interaction or you won't be efficient and too much is wasted.

Spend nine months and $100 and several hours a day on-line playing it and chatting about and planning for it - that's a fairly heavy commitment, too much for me. I wonder if the socio-political alliance engagement, being part of a team and working on stuff together makes it compelling? Call that the Skype theory of massive multi-player games: good interpersonal engagement is what drives commitment to the game.