Freeform Socialization. Sadly, this is the extent of social interaction allowed for in most multiplayer games. We slap a chatline into a game. Then we spend as much time making it look nice--by allowing for colored text, by making a library of hundreds of smileys, by putting it in cute little word balloons on the screen, or by using cool fonts--as we do considering how the chat lets people interact. And, sometimes, designers don't even go that far; some chats just seems like an afterthought, grossly slapped down on top of the millions of polygons which make up the true heart of the game (for those designers). Games that have gone beyond this level of freeform social interaction have mostly done it through social engineering: the socialization emerged a part of the culture rather than the game itself. The earliest TinyMUDs (1989) are perhaps some of the best examples, because they created societies of storytelling and human interaction pretty much out of whole cloth. In our own Castle Marrach here at Skotos we do have elements of competitive and cooperative play, but ultimately a lot of the social interaction comes down to freeform desires to tell meaningful stories together. Sims Online is an example of a more mass-market application of the same concepts.