Moonbase

Bryce posted a nice essay about the issues with player count in online RPGs, and why the “MM” in MMORPG might not be such a good thing. In one sense, what it boils down to is simply that social structures don’t scale. You need to explicitly consider the social requirements for the number of participants, and design accordingly.

I think it’s worth thinking about more than just games in social terms, however. Basically any nontrivial human (versus personal) endeavor is is driven by the requirements for human interaction and socialization. We didn’t go to the Moon just for moon rocks, nor were the pyramids built only for the dead.

Consider the Internet, for example. Sure, we can connect all these computers together so they can communicate. So what? What makes it interesting is that there are humans attached to those computers—or rather, computers attached to humans. Intellectual prosthesis. The Internet is interesting to humans because it is a network of humans. That is why it grows.

Similarly, Inkscape is popular primarily not because it is easy to make pretty pictures with it, but because it is easy to make pretty pictures which you can share with other humans. Thought experiment: suppose Inkscape 1.0 was released; it is a flawless drawing tool with only one limitation—files saved by one person cannot be opened by someone else. How many people do you think would use it?

This is why Inkscape is comitted to the SVG file format, despite the limitations we must accept in doing so. Using SVG natively expands the range of software - and therefore people - it can interoperate with. Inkscape becomes a more useful tool for communicating with other people, especially now that web browsers are beginning to include native SVG support.

Inkscape’s license also illustrates a different aspect of the people principle. The no-ad BSD license (for example) is plainly superior to the GPL in terms of the flexibility it gives the recipient of code. On the other hand, by this metric the GPL is in no way superior to BSD/MIT-style licenses, and in fact it has a lot of restrictions some people find onerous. It certainly limits the number of people who are willing to use or contribute to the code.

Why, then, is the GPL so popular, and why are well-managed GPL projects so successful? Because the GPL enforces a sustainable social protocol for collaborative software development. Where BSD-licensed projects succeed, is it because they generally observe the same “share-alike” protocol in practice.

I think it’s worthwhile, whatever it is you’re working on, to consider how your work can be used to facilitate interaction between people. Sometimes you will discover surprising possibilities; Inkboard, for example, brought Inkscape into a whole new sphere of human-to-human interaction.