This was a semester-long project for my Online Communities class in Spring, 2007 at Georgia Tech. We studied the massively-multiplayer online role playing game Maple Story through telephone interviews and participant observation.

We discovered that Maple Story is a very social game, much more so than more "serious" games like World of Warcraft. Maple Story players regularly just sit around and chat or have group events like racing each other across the world, things that don't seem to happen in other MMOs. The game also has a serious problem with players who use scripts and bots. Both of these aspects of the game can be explained through the lens of Richard Bartle's Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs: Maple Story's community is balanced towards the social player type because of the way the game dynamics work. There is a lot for social players to do, but other player types, achievers in particular, may find it tedious and slow at higher levels and resort to hacks to get ahead.

We also discovered that although the game's strength is the social aspects, it is very lacking when it comes to finding a social group (or guild) in the first place. Finding people of similar interests is important in Maple Story, and guild turnover can be high since joining a guild is essentially random. We found a similar problem in Warcraft, but with style of play rather than social interests. Therefore, we designed a new section of the game interface that would allow guilds to search for new members and allow members to search for guilds to make this process easier. It is based on other guild profiles and searches that we found, particularly the Everquest guild search, but with additions from our interview data that were specific to a social game like Maple Story.

The papers for this project are not yet available online.