MERELY A TEST

Going through my #evolutionarily logs it is becoming very apparent to me that I need a good text mining application. Something that will work like the Bank of English but that allows me to use just my own text selections. As I piece together more and more log files with the help of current community members, the task of extracting trends in the way people discuss community is appearing increasingly daunting...

All I really want to do with this is compile lines that have the word 'community' in them for statistical analysis. But just going through it once, the shallow impression I have is that for #evolutionarily, the IRC channel of a clan initially devoted to playing Natural Selection, community is constantly under negotiation, and frequently the subject of many fights. Community is extremely contested in the data I have, which spans the year from May 19 2003 to Saturday November 1 2003.

#evo is looking more interesting than #ns for discussions of community since it's more tightly-knit, and can occupy a critical insider/outside stance when it comes to discussing 'the community'

Another thing I've noticed is that 'the community' is extremely important - it's often used as a yardstick to measure how good/bad a mod is (it has a active or supportive/lame community), or how good a forum/chat member is (he contributes a lot to the community /or/ i've been in this community for X years).

There's also lots of nostalgia - apparently my logs date back only to after the release of Natural Selection, and many users warmly remember the pre-release days, 'before all the noobs came'

I also need to find a way to establish some demographic information. I believe it should be in here, spread out over the years, because #evo became quite a personal community. Just need to develop some methods for searching them out.

And let's not even talk about the IRB. Though it appears I need my faculty advisor to do it for me? this needs more looking-into

The Casual Gamer

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1946/designing_a_gameless_game_sulka_.php

That said, I think the industry should be careful about the use of the phrase "casual gamer." The casual gamer that Nintendo is going after -- soccer moms, older gamers -- is not the same as the casual gamer that helped propel the PS2 to break 100 million units.

An interesting point, especially about the 'casual gamer'. In many ways users of social networks are casual gamers. Whether we're looking at Habbo Hotel (another great GamaSutra article I need to read more thoroughly) or college students playing with Facebook Apps - hell, just creating and managing your online counterpart to your RL persona - it's all a game. It's a game that can have profound real-life consequences, but it's still essentially a mediated form of play. This kind of idea buttresses my argument (is it really challenged?) that the modes of creating social spaces in mod communities is actually very similar to the way non-gaming online communities are constructed by users.

In one way or another we're all casual gamers, as the Wii is helping us see.

I have a idea!

To what extent does participation in an online mod/gaming community interfere with or prevent participation in other, 'local' communities? With finite time, you have to sacrifice webtime to be with 'physical' friends, or 'physical' time to chat/be with web friends, don't you? That ought to be an interesting, maybe even crucial part of my discussion of online mod communities. How they replace physical communities to some extent and so the creation of interactive spaces may be a reaction, a replacement for 'real life' settings.

With that in mind, is it really any surprise that much of Second Life worldbuilding resembles architectural structures we'd see in 'real life'? And - shit - with that in mind, what does it say about modders that the spaces they construct and 'inhabit' (looking at modder's maps should be a critical element of this project) are often so far removed from spaces commonly inhabited in daily life?

Edit: This theory of virtual spaces could (and probably has been) applied all over game design and owes a lot to traditional architectural criticism - what makes a space more than a space? - and I can probably find a lot of resources about spatial construction. I probably should.

I need a better computer so I can examine these things, dammit!

Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur

All right, I've read the introduction to this book and I have to go wash the vomit out of my mouth. Is there any reason at all for me to read this? I thought it might feature an interesting perspective, I mean it's certainly an inflammatory idea, but it looks like it's just bitter reactionary fearmongering. Writing the first faux tell-all of the Web 2.0 movement must have been the easiest way to grab a buck, and judging from his writing, well, let's just say I hope it was easy. Andrew Keen is making me sick. Carole, do you know if there's any value in reading the rest of this? Not sure if this should be on my reading list.

Edit: Our trust in conventional advertising is being undermined? Oh no! Hahahahahahahaha

Mod Community Literature

There's not a whole lot of it. And what there is, is primarily focused on the monetization of the trend - how developers can take advantage of user ingenuity and encourage participation as a way of making life easier on them. Beta testing, level design, etc - it's all great and interesting, but not really what I'm interested in looking at.

I guess I'm more interested in looking at a couple things. The formation of mod communities and the formation of physical spaces as negotiated through modding tools.

So in a way, looking at how users-at-a-distance, through virtual interactions, are creating _real_ communities embedded in _real_ spaces, whether we're talking about a textual space like a forum or IRC or an interactive space like an in-game map. And how this is linked to other venues of personal expression/creation like MySpace pages, Facebook pages. To show that mod community uses of the internet as a collaborative, expressive tool are not just limited to the mod community.

Let's try that again in thesis-speak.

The goal of this paper is to examine the the ways in which the concept of community is incorporated in online mod communities through textual as well as graphic representation. I argue that this model of graphic representation can be applied to other forms of online community - in other words, that the same impulses that motivate modders to build physical spaces to inhabit also drives non-gamers to build more elaborate, personalized spaces to inhabit online.

Sounds all right.

Mod Culture

Thanks to some divine intervention in the form of a reading for Dr. Elliott's Historical Tourism seminar, I think I have a new approach for my thesis. Thanks to my 1:00 PM PE Class, I only have 15 minutes to list the outline I made last night - but I am going to be coming back to this list and fleshing out each point in more detail, and also doing some reorganization. Also, I'll be explaining my motivations for working on this and how it relates to my earlier idea of examining non-local versus local online communities (basically, gaming narrows the focus on both and I've got a great deal of unique, personal experience working in these communities)

I've assembled a prospective list of chapters (seriously, now that's organized) that are only in the vaguest of orders, but they highlight some of the most important and most interesting elements of mod culture.

1. Introduction - This Is Where The Thesis Goes
   
2. Why Modify?
3. Multiplayer Gaming, Online and Offline
4. Theory about Collaborative Communities and Community Formation
5. Creative Communities: Language Creation, Worldbuilding, Storytelling
6. Probably A Big Chapter on World Building Because It's So Goddamn Rich
7. Local and Non-Local Gaming Communities
8. Community Breakup :(
9. Something Resembling a Conclusion
   

I've got a good deal of IRC chatlogs and forum archives ready to be pillaged, and I believe those things were all recorded in public spaces so the IRB shant have a problem with them, but I should probably get going on IRB certification, especially because I still want to do interviews with forum members, modders, and gamers. The online element of this is easy - local gaming communities may end up being more of a sidenote, but they're still pretty crucial in at least establishing a sort of chronology for how this subculture all built up.

Now, establishing a tie to American Studies and America specifically? That might be difficult. :X