Quick thoughts: collaborative achievement

So I've recently been thinking a lot about what I've come to call collaborative accomplishment or collaborative achievement (which term works better?). And it's sort of a meta concept for me, really, encompassing neatly a number of powerful experiences and human dynamics that have cropped up in different places, a sort of unified field theory of social dymanics.

My understanding of the workings of online (and other) social dynamics is all rooted, so much as I can, in the basics... Why are people so engaged with games? They're sandboxes, enabling us to experiment, challenge ourselves, and learn to win. What's with the odd twistings of online social identity? Again, it

is an experimental zone, where people have (more) freedom to play with how they interact and present themselves to others, and, incidentally, can take a larger role in the formation of their culture. I've come to see culture as a dynamic process of negotiation about social identity, how to organize, successful strategies, and succeed in the group.

So I've been fascinated by Blizzard, and WoW, for some time. Fascinated, for example, by how much some of my Burning Man pals appreciate the catalytic role the questing plays in social activity, and especially how Blizzard has seemed to consistently push the experience towards highly organized team activities. And also, I've been interested lately in the various typographies of social roles, from Richard Bartle's MMO player types to Meyers-Briggs, DISC, etc. 

And I think what ties it all together for me is the core notion of team accomplishment - that we, as a species, owe our success to being able to organize and accomplish as a group. And that we're accordingly hard-wired to enjoy the process of evolving successful group roles and strategies, that it's in our makeup to love working together to win.

I hope this doesn't sound too simplistic. I'm just really excited by how much of human behavior becomes comprehensible from this perspective, especially around games and online (and other) social behavior. And too... what an elegant structure for creating successive emergent strategies. Especially as we now have such amazing, and evolving, tools for developing and implementing them.

Comments

[Deg]

I think it ties into a human need to have a purpose and feel important. By leading others or being a part of something, they can create (to some extent) purpose and importance.

[ronmeiners]

Agreed Deg, totally. Though I've come to look at it from the other way around: that the feeling of satisfaction and importance are driven by how valuable these are as social roles. I mean, having a hero in your group is really useful. Hence, being a hero feels really good: net effect, the group thrives.
Games, I think, have always been a chance to experiment with success and trying new strategies, but the new realm of games really opens the door to a lot of learning. Basically, we're training ourselves to be really effective really collaborative achievers. And it feels really good!
What's coming next?
;-)

[aion kinah]

I agree, especially if in real life you can't be as good as you can be in an online game. You can be whoever you want to be without any limitations, it will all depend to you. Like you, WoW was my training ground on being sociable and now there's another chance to excel with Aion online.

[RPG Titles]

Well I have to agree that you can be a different person in a game, but that doesn't mean you can't strive to better yourself in RL. Excellent post.