The first thirty seconds

Pocket edition. This is a shorter version of a longer article; you can read the full edition when you have more time.

Think back to the last time you joined a new server. You probably decided whether you liked it before you played anything. You didn't reason it out: you felt it.

The psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal discovered something uncomfortable about us. People who watched video clips just a few seconds long of a lecturer teaching, with no sound, gave ratings that matched those of students who had spent an entire semester with him. They called these "thin slices": judgements formed from a ridiculously small amount of information, and surprisingly stable afterwards.

A spawn is a thin slice. In half a minute you read whether the place is alive or empty, whether it demands something of you or lets you look around, whether there's something in the distance that makes you curious, whether anyone thought about you being comfortable there.

And almost no server designs that half-minute. It designs what comes afterwards: the modes, the ranks, the shop. The spawn is left as a place of passage full of signs, notices and flashing things, which sends exactly the opposite message: there's something to sell you here before you've even looked around.

The hard part isn't making it pretty. It's holding back. It's letting someone arrive, look, poke around and breathe, trusting that the place can speak for itself. A place that doesn't need to shout at you in the first minute is usually a place where the rest of the hours feel good too.