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

Historical Tourism: Exciting New Ways to Dress up and Kill People

Historical Tourism: Exciting New Ways to Dress up and Kill People

[Day of Defeat] is completely user-generated - that means enough people thought this would be a good idea that they gathered together online and spent years toiling to produce what in many respects is the virtual counterpart to the re-enactments chronicled by Jenny Thompson. Meticulous attention is paid to detail, from the exact specifications of various weapons, uniforms, and equipment to the motivations behind each specific battle. Why, if you're curious, you can even head over to the forums where you can find over 10,000 active members discussing military history and culture, how to accurately recreate a german sniper, or how real is too real to be fun.

Even better, we have the organizations that develop around the game. Gamers congregate into groups, give themselves authentic names, and play each other as squadrons of American, British, German, or Russian soldiers.

Click dat link above for a post on Dr. Elliott's graduate seminar blog that originated from my reading of a book on World War II reenactors. It got me thinking about a new approach to my thesis. I took a lot of notes in class last night (sorry Dr. Elliott! :[ ) and I'll post them here later. I'm also thinking about getting in touch with Susan Tamasi of the linguistics department because this new approach will probably touch on language use and creation as well as local and non-local communities, but we'll see.

Links links links

http://webcommunityforum.com <- bling http://graphingsocial.com/ http://scobleizer.com/ http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/ Oh, why must I have class when all I wish to do is read and post more on this, the most researchy of blogs. Mod Links Revisited GamaSutra is a great resource for game developer news and discussion, and I think it'll be a great resource in finding Mod community, uh, resources. www.gamasutra.com Warren Ellis, Reporting on Second Life

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,987018,00.html?promoid=googlep

Local vs. Global Communities

The internet is changing the way communities are constructed, but not in the way early internet theorists predicted. Instead of global connectivity, most users of the internet today are thinking locally. Web 2.0 Phenomena such as Flickr, Facebook, and Myspace allow users to connect with anyone across the globe, yet (pending) research suggests that most users of these sites connect with people they already know rather than searching out users they haven't met.

How have the expectations of internet theorists for global connectivity (not) been fulfilled? The central, defining difference here is between local and global connectedness. Through surveys among Emory University undergraduates and interviews with members of a non-local internet forum, Natural Selection, I will attempt to shed some light on why users choose to participate in global or local communities, and which, if any, they prefer. Supplementing my ethnographic research is my personal experience as a member of both local and non-local online communities throughout the past 7 years.

Some questions that will play into the research:

What form do these communities take, and what usage differences may be structurally influenced? (Forums and social networking sites have very different architectures). What about sites like Myspace which combine both personal profiles and forums?

What motivates people to join non-local communities? Gather impressions from online interviews with members current and inactive from Natural Selection.

What are some other sorts of non-local communities besides NS? Full-disclosure, which am I a member of? What are some other local-community enabling sites?

What sort of people, demographically speaking, join non-local communities? What sort join local communities?

How does one define 'community', especially in such a specific context as this. Community is simultaneously at its least tangible and most concrete, with interactions being in many cases permanently archived or catalogued. - Non-local communities are often incarnated at the site of interaction, whether through forum postings, chatlogs, or private messages. In contrast, local communities often have no site of interaction, the community in this case being imagined with no physical connections present - only the imagined connections between users contributing to the sense of community.

In practice, most sites of community (local and non-local) are both 'imagined' and 'physical' in that there is usually some physical trace of interaction amid mostly-intangible imagined communities (walls on facebook) and a great deal of imagined community present among users of non-local communities.

Often one user will participate in both at the same time, or move from one to another. In my experience from participation in the Natural Selection NLC (non-local community), users move from non-local to local communities. In my observation, the path is from NLCs to LCs, but I'm confident many users move the other way - from Local to Non-Local communities. However, I think most members of LCs never 'leave' their communities like members of NLCs leave theirs.


Potential Survey or Interview questions:

Are you or have you ever been a member of a local online community (i.e., do you connect with RL friends through facebook, myspace, or other social networking sites?)

Are you or have you ever been a member of a global online community (i.e., an online community where you communicated with people you have never met before?)

If so, what sort of non-local community did you belong to? Describe your participation in this community.

On a scale of 1-10, rate your participation level from least to greatest.

On a scale of 1-10, rate your level of attachment to the people you met.

If you have been a member of both sorts of community, which would you describe as more important to your life?


What theorists will I be referring to, drawing from, or (dis)agreeing with?

Michele A. Willson, Technically Together - Rethinking Community within Techno-Society

Willson's book, which I've only recently begun, looks to be promising in its focus on analyzing different scholarly approaches to constructing community online.

Danah Boyd, assorted writings

While not very well-read in Danah Boyd's catalogue, her research into online communities is among the most interesting and (in my opinion) accurately up-to-date available. Additionally, it's all available in pdf form on her website, www.danah.org, which makes accessing it extremely easy. I'm reasonably confident I'll be looking to her works for inspiration/points to argue over.

Derek M. Powazek, Design for Community

Powazek's practically-oriented book on designing communal spaces online looks to be a good reference on the structural foundations of local and non-local community building. While this edition was printed in 2002, before the astronomical success of social networking sites and 'web 2.0', it will still serve as a useful point of reference for a discussion of non-local communities, which predate local online communities by at least a decade.

Direction, Part 1

So, my basic observation is this: The 'global community' idea early internet scholars were impressed by succeeded only to a limited degree. Restricted by socioeconomic factors, only certain demographics were truly impacted by the unveiling of the web as a public tool for connectivity. That said, access restrictions were not the only reason for the limited success of a global village.

There are currently two forms of online community. Topic-based communities, which are capable of bridging users together across the world, and local communities such as those promoted through the rise of Web 2.0 social webapps.

Topically based communities carry the 'global community-building' torch, providing one model of community.

This model is now effectively at war with the 'Hyperlocal Web' model. Seeking to recreate pre-existing personal relationships on the web rather than forging new relationships at great distance, Local communities are emerging as a serious contender for user attention, and apps such as Facebook and Flickr are encouraging users to stay 'close to home'

This is not necessarily a 'bad thing' at all. The internet is incredibly open and modifiable by its users, and this trend toward Local Communities may not signal a trend away from Topical Communities. But can Local Communities really be called 'communities' of their own?

I want to examine the functions of these communities, drawing mostly from two sources. One is the Natural Selection modding community (www.natural-selection.org) which I participated in from 2001-2004 and the other is Facebook, which I've been a member of since 2004.

So here are some preliminary thoughts on the direction I want to take this in.

I'm concerned with the transforming nature of online communities. Early internet scholars (you know, a long, long time ago) saw the internet and the web as an unprecedented tool for linking individuals together and fostering greater inter-cultural understanding around the country and around the world. This was a great idea, even though technological and economic limitations kept the 'global village' pretty first-world for a long time. But how well did it really work out?

Communities form around issues or around topics. I'm basing that only on my own possibly foolish assumptions, and that's why I'll be researching community theory a bit (enough to understand when and why my foot is in my mouth). But - assuming I'm at least mostly correct in this - one big prerequisite for any online community is a shared value, belief, profession, or hobby. There are virtually no limits to what communities can be based around (please, don't visit this link), but there are limits to how large an online community can grow, and these limits are set through a number of factors:

(this is completely my own idea and thus as full of holes as a slice of swiss cheese)
1. Exclusivity vs. Accessibility

Establishing the proper balance of exclusivity and accessibility is critical for online communities today, though this was not always the case. In the early days of the net, accessibility was key - getting your site out to as many people as possible was about the most important thing you had to do. When the internet was 'new', it imposed enough of an accessibility barrier that every site, no matter how open, already felt exclusive. Access was limited to college campuses, and later to the early adopters of dialup. (this part is a little rough - i think the idea would hold, but i have nothing supporting this right now. I'm thinking of doing more research on America Online as the 'equalizer' of the internet. What was that event called, the Eternal September?)

I've gotten a little off track. Anyway, in the early days accessibility was king. You wanted everyone to be able to get to your newsgroup or forum to read and contribute. Now, exclusivity is nearly as important as accessibility, at least for online communities. Here's a few reasons:

An open community:

1. lots of spam
2. an undifferentiated userbase
3. anonymity destroys community

A closed community:

1. A dedicated user-base - make it harder to join and they'll want to join more
2. Users who have to work to join a community are better contributors, spend more time there
3. While closed communities can be smaller, they are often more productive and result in better personal relationships than open communities where anyone can join.

There are different levels of 'security' that allow community builders to negotiate access. Invite-only communities, registration-required communities (and these vary widely in the information required to register), and more. My general observation is that the more exclusive a community, the stronger it is. The difficulty is in reaching critical mass, or attracting enough users to get the community started before cutting off accessibility and raising the gates.


2. Specificity vs. Generality

The intuitive jump here may be to assume that more specific topics will have fewer communities, and less active ones. Conversely, more general groups will have larger, more active communities. This is frequently not the case, however. In my observation, while a more general group is often larger, the more specific group is often much more active. Large forum-based online communities can take advantage of this idea by establishing subforums to encourage more specialized subcommunities to develop, thus preventing users from escaping to other topic-directed sites. (SA provides a great example of this, but pretty much every forum buys into this idea on one level or another. Specific forums - such as VW Vortex - also often include Off-topic sections, to allow for general, non-topical conversations. )

Specific = Smaller = More Active = Stronger Community (define strength, what is strong community?)

General = Larger = Less Active (unless with subforums) = Weaker Community

How to define community strength? This is critical to my thesis so i have to make sure I understand and explain this very well. Indicators and causes?

One indicator of community strength is longevity. The more active the community, the longer it lasts. When the spirit leaves, the body frequently dies. There are some 'zombie communities' out there that exist only practically as archives with no more contributing members, but due to the costs of server maintenance, abandoned forums and message boards usually go offline eventually. Of course, the content is often preserved - whether in massive web archival projects of individual users' archives - but the community itself is dead.

One cause of community strength is depth - the volume of posts, the rate of replies, the level of private-messaging and extra-site activity. Basically, the deeper a community, the stronger it is and the longer it will last. Deep communities form a barrier to accessibility, since there can often be a steep learning curve and disdain for 'newbies'.

Another cause is, as mentioned, exclusivity. Instill your users with pride to be a member and they will be better members for it.

3. Format (Newsgroup / BBS / Message Board / Forum / Profile Pages?)

Certain formats are more conducive to community building, in my opinion, than in others. From email-based newsgroups and mailing lists to linearly structured message boards, to multi-level forums with greater depth and operating costs, to the most recent development of networked profile pages, methods of displaying / producing community are consistently evolving. But in the web, no method ever truly dies - so we can observe any of these forms of 'community' today with a quick web search.


--------------



Local Web communities suck users away from Topical communities.

Carrell

Books I'm currently reading or planning on reading:

Technically Together - Rethinking Community Within Techno-Society by Michele A. Willson. 2006. Peter Lang Publishing, New York.

Rise of Network Society - Manuell Castells, 2nd ed.

Community - Key Ideas by Gerard Delanty. 2003, routledge

First Post!!1

Hello and welcome to my research blog. What makes this blog particularly 'researchy', you ask? Well, this is where I'll post all my scribblings, my notes, my potential leads. This is where you'll see the direction of my project take shape, slowly but (hopefully) surely. This is where you'll find the hottest new music on the block. And this is where you'll come to find out what, exactly, is the deal with transitioning modes of online community.

Exciting topics may include:

• Notes on Community Theory
• Notes on Web Design Theory
• Anti-Web 2.0 Diatribes
• Mini-reviews and excerpts of the things I'm reading
• Pleas for help in interpreting Manuel Castells
• Inconsolable sobbing

So if you're down with that, I'm down with you. Welcome aboard. Buckle up - it's going to be a bumpy ride.