Chatting on every website, expected and actual use

The Nethernet has an IRC-based chat client in its toolbar. You can click on “Chat” from the toolbar while on any URL, rendering a chat window on every website. And before you join the room, you can see how many players are actually using it. For its power, this is an under-utilized feature.

Expected Use:
We thought that players would convene on their favorite websites and memes to talk about the content. We see game events huddled around I Can Haz Cheezburger?, BoingBoing, and Twitter. What we’re not seeing is groups of people showing up to these chat rooms looking for each other. Or if they are looking for each other, they join, see that no one else is around, and leave.

We had chat rooms enabled on IRC long before chat on URLs was available. We ran a room just called #pmog on irc.freenode.net. At any time, between 15 and 30 players and GameLayers, Inc. employees would be in that room. In addition to the Forums, #pmog helped the core of our community grow and develop PMOG-based activities like The Tubenauts podcast and PRisk.

Actual Use:
Rather than players consistently returning to the URL-based rooms that the chat enables, they’ve been creating rooms based on Classes and their community roles. They’ve also created meme-based rooms that function apart from any website. You can’t keep a good meme down, I guess. #ikillforbacon and #destroyers are two of the rooms that meme and game-based on irc.thenethernet.com. Each player who joins clicks on Chat is automatically logged into #thenethernet.com.

Most interestingly, we haven’t seen a big increase in the number of players using chat. Essentially the same players who met us on irc.freenode.net are with us on our own IRC server. So despite the one-click chat on every URL we haven’t actually made our chat function more accessible.

Takeaway:
Incentivize the frack out of it! Our junior developer/game designer, Alex Friedman, keeps a sticky note on his desk that says: “If you want players to do something, make it a game event.” We haven’t yet done anything to reward players who use the chat function. Additionally, The Nethernet does not yet have any kind of “group” feature. I would imagine that if players got datapoints for chatting using our client and if we had some sort of groups or guilds system, chat would be used a lot more.

Really cool to see how stuff like this plays out!