Preface
I am an old-timer, literally a grandma. Aside from dabbling in MUDs, my first graphical MMORPG experience was Ultima Online in 1997, which I just messed around in. Then came EverQuest in 1999, which my (late ex-) husband and I played so much our dial-up ISP called to complain that we were abusing our unlimited access. I spent at least a decade there, with a few short breaks in the last few of those years. Do I have nostalgia glasses? Yes. I wear them on a chain around my neck like the old lady I am. I am giving you this as background so that you know that the following comes out of first-hand experience.
Hypothesis
The difference between the personal social experience of playing in MMORPGs before the 2010s and after is a matter of the desires and expectations of the majority of players.
Utterly Unscientific Commentary
Once upon a time, there was a worldwide web without social media sites as we know them today and there was an internet beyond the worldwide web. Back in those days, your grandma wasn’t online. Your grandma probably didn’t even have an email address. The people who were online were just jazzed to be a part of this new frontier of infinite possibilities. The social aspect of Internet Relay Chat (IRC), forums, email lists (listservs), MUDs, and all the other weird little special interest platforms that popped up was the main draw of those things.
When MMORPGs emerged in that primordial digital soup, it was the prospect of existing in a virtual world with hundreds or thousands (and eventually hundreds of thousands) of other people that was so exciting. Yes, these were games and the structure and mechanics of gameplay did matter, but there were plenty of great games you could play over a LAN with your friends, on a local BBS, or by yourself. The main draw of this new genre was the massively multiplayer aspect; people showed up specifically to play with other people all over the world.
Time went on like time does. The rest of the world discovered the internet. It became increasingly centralized. Your grandma got an email address and joined Facebook. It wasn’t an amazing adventure to be online meeting strangers on the other side of the world anymore. It had become ordinary.
Since then, there have been endless debates about what happened to the social environment in MMORPGs. I am guilty of involving myself in arguments about “forced” grouping, open vs. instanced dungeons, guild tools, and all the other game mechanics that may support more social gameplay. Those debates are worth having, but that is sidestepping the main issue: the internet gaming landscape has changed drastically. We’ve changed. We’ve been joined by a lot of people who take the connectivity of the internet for granted and just want to play a game.
I know. I am restating the obvious.
But here’s my question: Is there something that might come along to reignite some of the passion for playing with strangers? I feel like the whole genre has been stuck in a bit of a rut, while less-massively multiplayer co-op games have exploded onto the scene in a kaleidoscope of variations, from wilderness survival games to ghost hunting. Many people playing those kinds of games are playing with real-life friends or friends-of-friends, or people they met on Discord. This hearkens back to the day of LAN parties, without the stains on the carpet afterward. I am not sure what MMOs can take from that except that people really do want to play together cooperatively. What could make the massively part matter again?
Perhaps more large-scale server quests? Maybe some sort of meaningful territory control? Maybe something that instills a sense of really belonging in a faction? I am sure smarter people than me have better answers. I just don’t think that the incremental innovations being made are going to inspire the longevity that the older games had, much less build a sustainable community.
The MMOist 
Imo, you’re absolutely right in your hypothesis. Whole different generations are online now, and what they want out of their games are quite different. Possibly even attention spans are different between the generation who grew up able to focus on a book and the generation that can flip through TikToks faster than I can find the correct app on a phone.
Meeting new people online is not much of an exciting draw these days. Filtering them out is sometimes more desirable. It’s an online flood of strangers anyway. The online generation already come with their own connected posses. And there can be a lot of bad actors that one doesn’t want to interact with.
As for how to reignite some of the more prosocial feelings among strangers, I think one thing many games these days have missed or even purposefully deprioritized in favor of solving other problems, is the opportunity for players to see the same names appear again and again in a localized play space to build up familiarity and interactions over time.
The human brain cannot keep track of a thousand or more. Everyone becomes an interchangeable faceless mass only to be exploited as needed. The human brain is made to keep track of, say, ten. Ten people who I know their names, who may extend me tit for tat, helping and being helped as needed, and potentially ruining my reputation to others if I act badly. That moderates peoples’ behaviors to something more prosocial. (Preventing the ability to act badly in a game via hardcoded design doesn’t hurt either.)
There are really only two game spaces that have worked on me in recent years for this – GW2’s WvW which limits players to a single server and there can only be say 60-100 players in the same map (less so once guilds started transferring off and on servers), and a Tale in the Desert where moving long distances is tedious and the same ten or so players are often seen in the same geographical region together, where game rules encourage community contribution to advance the region as a group goal.
I dare say there are other ways other players get this localized grouping. Guilds are one. Discord communities. Raid groups. Twitch streamer communities. Many of which become more ‘meta’ and prime importance over the more natural interaction of any game space, possibly due to more of an exclusivity mindset among some members. The problem I have with much of these is that it takes an additional action to “join up” and there is often an expectation of additional energy/effort to contribute to the group also, outside of the game space. This, members would say, is also the point of such communities. They seem to cannibalize on more natural game-formed networks though.
Maybe what we’re also missing these days is the more intermediate game-encouraged community. I recall some MUDs used to just automatically group new players/characters into certain network groups – be it new players + helping mentors, or chucking classes into a ‘guild’ of players all playing the same class (the idea being that you could learn class specific tips that way.) Having a shared channel allowed for new players to have access to more experienced players and meet others that way.
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Firstly, I also agree the hypothesis is broadly valid.
Secondly, OMG! Jeromai! Long time, no see!
Thirdly, while it’s true that your grandma probably wasn’t online in 1997, an awful lot of grandmas and grandpas were. So many that there was a collective name for them that apppeared frequently in the media of that time – Silver Surfers. I was 40 when I started playing EverQuest in 1999 and I was not even close to being one of the oldest players I met, even then. At least two guild-leaders I knew then were past retirement age. One was in her 70s.
Fourthly, the notion that attention spans have declined is a myth. Google it. There are more articles now debunking it than there were a few years ago proclaiming it. Also there’s evidence, more importantly.
Lastly, do we actually want to go back to those social days of early MMOs? I don’t and I doubt most people who played then do, either. I also doubt most people who played then still play MMOs at all. It was a phenomenon of its time, like the hula hoop or the charleston. I do agree that smaller population blocks that allow for players to get to recognize others through repeated meetings with them is a preferable option to vast megaservers but I wouldn’t then go from that to the kinds of social interactions we used to suffer and/or enjoy back in the old days. The GW2 WvW experience was radically different to that, being far more casual and unstructured. The problem was, there were always people agitating to make it more formal and impose structure on it, as in the insistence on private Commander tags that ANet finally caved and added.
I don’t think we can turn back the clock on most of this any more than we can all get twenty years younger, which is what I think most of the requests to go back to the good old days are really code for anway.
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