Community

So far in this chapter, I’ve been talking about players as individuals, at a “psychological” level. Now it’s time to look at collections of individuals, at a “sociological” level. The object of study increases in size from individual to group to community to society. In virtual worlds, it’s most important to understand individuals and community first; groups have elements of both in them, and society implies large numbers of diverse but interdependent communities that just don’t exist in virtual worlds (yet).

Beginnings

When the Internet hit the headlines in the mid-1990s, there was much talk about how important “community” was. Community meant retention: If you had community, people would keep coming back. I attended numerous conferences where “community” was hailed as if it were an amazing new discovery. Big name executives of games companies’ newly formed online divisions drummed in the idea that community was IMPORTANT. They didn’t know anything else about it, of course, but they knew it was IMPORTANT.

They were right, of course: Community is important. So is money, but my knowing that doesn’t help me get it into my bank account. Identifying a problem doesn’t solve it.

Back then, community was looked on as some kind of commodity. “Why won’t people buy our sheds over the Net? Our web site really needs some community.” Times have changed, of course, and business people now have a better understanding of when community can be used and what it delivers. However, it can still sometimes be seen as a commodity.

Virtual world developers are pretty good in this respect, as it happens, because most of them have played virtual worlds themselves and have first-hand experience of what membership of an “online community” implies. They partition community/ customer and relations/service/management into a separate division and try to staff it with people who know what they’re doing ¹.

The big issues concern responsibility: If the community managers want a change made to the way that the virtual world works (perhaps to correct some perceived imbalance by the players) but the designers don’t want to make it (because they feel it undermines the integrity of the virtual world), then who wins? In theory it should be the designers, because they are the only people able to account for the virtual world as a whole; in practice, it’s often the community managers, because they can show company high-ups actual short-term data to support their arguments (designers can only really say long-term “trust us”). Experienced developers have policy documents in place to ensure that a balance between knee-jerk compromise and grandiose vision is achieved.

So, what is community? Interesting though this question is, it doesn’t actually matter to designers—community is what they get, whether or not they like it! The more pressing questions are what kind of community should the virtual world have, and how should designers set about ensuring it has it?

Unfortunately, communities are 20% nature and 80% nurture. Designers set up the nature—the conditions that allow a community to develop along certain lines. The members of the community (influenced to varying degrees by the community management team) perform the nurture—how the community develops. Even identical incarnations of virtual worlds will usually end up having recognizably different communities.

For many small virtual worlds (such as college MUDs), communities are already there at the beginning: A bunch of people from an existing virtual world decide to set up their own, or an enthusiastic individual does so and calls on real-world friends to take a look. The community that develops is sufficiently small so that administrators can directly influence its disposition. For a large-scale virtual world, however, it’s a different story. Complete strangers will be coming together. How will this community develop?

Here’s how it works.

The virtual world reaches a point where it needs to be beta-tested. Invitations to the closed beta are sent out, and a small group of players signs up. The primary aim is for them to test for balance and bugs; the secondary aim is to create a marketing buzz about the virtual world so people will be eager to try it. As time passes, more people are admitted into the program, eager to see the virtual world and put it through its paces. The world goes into open beta, accumulating yet more players; thus, when it finally launches, the developers can be fairly sure that everything will work and that there’ll already be an established player base ².

So where does the community originate? You can’t simply “create it;” it has to grow from relationships formed between players. Which players? The beta-testers: They are the ones who will establish the social norms, the culture, and the ethos of the virtual world; they seed the community ³. It would make sense, therefore, for a virtual world to pack its beta with responsible individuals who exhibit the kind of mature attitude that will lead to a vibrant and prosperous community. Gung-ho, hard-core, hit-it-till-it-breaks beta-testers are therefore perhaps not the best choice from this perspective.

Here’s how to seed a community badly, which happens to coincide with the industry standard model for graphical virtual game worlds:

• Recruit the hard-core players of other games as beta-testers, so you only get the ones with low product loyalty who’ll leave your game the moment a newer one comes along. Go for guild leaders who might bring their whole guild with them.

• Enthuse them to create a buzz about your game on super-critical fan sites read mainly by people who need reassurance that the game they play is no worse than any of the others.

• Create a web site for your own game that won’t be read by any of the people who’ll eventually play it.

• Listen to the beta-testers, so as to make your game exactly like the games they first played against which all others pale in comparison.

• Hey presto! You have a virtual world primed with just the kind of players you don’t want!

Designers can’t do a lot about how a community is born, or even how it is fostered, but they control its environment. They can encourage and discourage particularly desirable or undesirable activities, and although their ability to force an issue is limited, nevertheless they do have a considerable part to play.

If they’re to do it right, of course, they need to have a reasonable analytic model of how communities work.

Levels of Community

Joe Newbie arrives at a virtual world. He’s not there alone—people are busy, they come and go, the whole place looks vibrant. He quickly picks up the basics of the user interface he’s using, and feels a little awkward. He’s new, he doesn’t know the ropes, he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself asking a dumb question. Yet he’s eager to participate, to let people know he’s there. What does he do?

Well, perhaps emboldened by the realization that no one knows who he is, and that character creation wasn’t so painful that he’d hate to do it again, he makes the first move and regales a passer-by. Or perhaps a community representative is on greeter duty and comes over to break the ice. Or perhaps there’s a newbie hose and suddenly standing right next to him is Joanna Newbie, whom he can speak to because she’s in exactly the same situation as he is.

The ability to communicate is the entrance qualification for a community. Everyone who can communicate shares a (very loose) community with everyone with whom they can communicate.

As to what they communicate about, that depends. In the first example here, Joe Newbie just wants to communicate, period. In the second example, he may have some procedural questions he can ask of the community management rep, but it’ll be at the level of polite conversation; to the rep, Joe is just the latest in a long line of newbies, and it’s impossible to form strong ties with all of them. In the third example, though, Joe and Joanna share a context. Both are in an enticing new world that they want to explore but don’t fully understand, while surrounded by people who know a lot more than they do. It’s daunting, but it’ll be easier if they team up. They have a shared interest: Joe can talk to Joanna because they’re both in the same boat.

Greeters have three aims: to reassure newbies; to ensure they understand the basics of how to play; to introduce them to the community. If they can hook them up with another newbie, so much the better. What happens thereafter is up to the players themselves.

A lot of work has been done on the notion of community in the real world. It’s important to architects, anthropologists, aid workers, ad companies (and those are just the A’s). Unlike most of the topics important for virtual worlds, the study of community has a solid body of work behind it. For designers, the problem is therefore the pleasant one of distilling salient points from a wealth of theory.

Here are the basics of community. Communities are groups of people who:

• Have the means and opportunity to communicate with one another.

• Have some reason for communicating with one another.

• Share a cultural context.

• Can choose the degree to which they participate in the community.

• Can be in other communities at the same time.

Members of communities have to have the ability to communicate (to talk), the chance to communicate (they’re in the same location as someone who can hear), and some grounds to communicate (to find something out) ¹. They must share a cultural context, so what they say will be understood (they have to speak the same language). Communities have voluntary participation—you can put as much into them as you want to—and their memberships overlap.

Virtual world designers have understood all this for some time, at least at an intuitive level, and they routinely look for ways to further it in their games. They add new communication commands, new management tools, new ways to enable friends to find each other, and new dimensions along which players can group.

These criteria outline what a community is; all communities must have them to some extent. There are other features that communities often have, but that they don’t necessarily have to have; the more they do have, though, the stronger the community is. From a virtual world perspective, the most important of these characteristics are:

• Members have a shared pool of knowledge.

• Members adhere to common practices.

• The community has a history.

• Members share a vision of the community’s future.

• Members work together on projects that are for the benefit of the community.

This list is more useful from a designer’s point of view, because it suggests concrete ways to encourage communities to be strong. We’ll look at some of these shortly.

Strong communities are desirable because the stronger the bonds between people, the less likely they are to want to break those bonds (for example, by going off and playing someone else’s virtual world). It may therefore appear that pushing community heavily is an indication that a virtual world doesn’t have enough gameplay to sustain it, however this is not the case: Community is a good thing to have no matter how compelling the content of a virtual world is. That said, when community-friendliness extends to significantly undermining gameplay, that is a warning sign that a virtual world is in trouble.

Community “strength” is described in terms of levels of community. How many levels there are depends on what you want to use them for, and some levels are more important than others for particular applications. For the purposes of virtual worlds, however, there are five levels, the first of which is trivial but I’ll mention it anyway.

In increasing strength:

• Communication

• Community of interest

• Community of practice

• Community of commitment

• Spiritual community

You get communication by default in virtual worlds; merely by showing up, you’re communicating something. The first “proper” type of community is the community of interest, wherein people with the same individual goals and interests group together as a means of furthering those aims. Mechanisms for pooling and sharing knowledge and information develop, leading to a community of practice. An important emergent property of this is that members start to view the community as offering more than simply a means to an end, but of having intrinsic value itself. Community members then begin to work together on projects that are important to the aims or shared vision of the community, investing significant time and effort for the benefit of the community as a whole: This gives a community of commitment. The final stage, the spiritual community, arises when individual members understand and trust each other so implicitly that they can communicate almost intuitively. At this level, the personal bonds between members are supremely strong. Most communities never reach this level.

For example, suppose after sitting down playing computer games for too long, you decided it was time to get into shape. You go to a gym and sign up. Even if you were there to clean the floors, you’d be able to talk to anyone and they to you, so at the very least you’re in a communication community. The instructors show you and other newcomers the pieces of apparatus available, and you set to work. Everyone else there wants to get fit or keep fit, so they have the same goals as you: You’re in a community of interest. The instructors and some of the longer-term members give you tips on how to tone up your abdomen or whatever, and warnings if you’re doing something wrong. In so doing, you form friendships with some of them. This puts you in a community of practice. One evening, at a dinner party with a few of your friends from the gym, someone mentions that the gym isn’t really used much during the day. Someone else says there must be schools or charities that could make use of the facilities; after all, helping people become fit is always a good thing. Someone on the gym’s management committee suggests a feasibility study. You volunteer to contact the nearby hospital’s physiotherapy unit to see if it would be interested, another friend says they’ll look into any potential problems with insurers, and pretty soon everyone is involved. It’s now a community of commitment. In the months of fighting local bureaucracy that follows, the team suffers several major setbacks; individuals rally to the support of each other, though, which serves to strengthen their relationships further. Eventually, when the first of many batches of underprivileged teenagers arrives for their session, you know exactly how everyone who helped organize it is feeling—it’s as if you shared emotions. You have a spiritual community.

It’s clear from this example that not only can a community be at different levels, but that it can be at different levels at the same time. While long-term members of a community of commitment are out there doing their bit, newbies are arriving who have some definite personal reason for being there that has nothing to do with any grandiose schemes for advancing the community’s aims. To be strictly accurate, of course, the broader community consists of a number of smaller communities that constantly shift, change, and overlap. Whether you treat these sub-communities as distinct from the community as a whole or not is up to you: It makes sense to look at communities both ways, depending on the context.

Looking just at community levels, virtual world designers are presented with a number of opportunities to strengthen the bonds between players. The boundaries between the different levels of community are particularly fruitful.

For example, for people to join a community of interest, they must find other people who share that interest: A matchmaking service to connect players who are looking for a group with groups who are looking for new members is one way of doing this. Allowing groups to own property, keep archives, and institute a formal structure will encourage the development of communities of practice. Communities of commitment will arise if groups are afforded goals that are distinct from the goals of individuals. Spiritual communities will evolve if groups are put under immense emotional pressure.

There are two important points to bear in mind if you want to try this sort of thing.

Firstly, remember that participation in groups is a voluntary thing. If players can’t get anywhere unless they’re in a group, you’re effectively forcing them to join a group. Players should be able to spend time on their own if they feel like it. Explorers may want to discuss what they’ve found out after a hard day’s experimenting, but they probably won’t want to have to hook up with six other people just to do the experimenting.

Secondly, the order is important! Putting a community of interest under severe stress is only going to scatter it most of the time. Use smaller conflicts as filters so that the riskiest situations are only available for those groups mature enough to handle them.

Even in the right order, stress might have unacceptable consequences. A community of commitment is usually strong enough to stay together for the most part when the going gets tough, but there is fallout; it’s in repairing the emotional damage that spiritual communities can arise, but if that means some players fall by the wayside and quit, is it really worthwhile? In the real world, army units often form spiritual communities under fire ², but no sane army commander is going to bomb their own troops just to build a sense of camaraderie.

Levels of community reflect the relationships between community members. Ultimately, therefore, they depend on the individuals concerned. No matter how much designers or community relations staff might encourage players to form stronger bonds, some people (perhaps most people) are just too independent. Communities of practice are relatively easy to achieve, but as soon as players have to commit to doing something for the community (rather than for themselves), many will balk. Some players relish the opportunity to organize others, but a good many more don’t—and some of these will only reluctantly agree to be organized by anyone at all.

When designers are designing for community, they are really designing for relationships. In Dark Age of Camelot, players who want to join a group can flag themselves as being available. In the real world, people who don’t want to find a partner can flag themselves as being unavailable (by wearing a wedding ring). The defaults are different, but the purpose is the same: to signal availability or otherwise to prospective suitors.

Groups emerge from the interactions of people; communities emerge from the interactions of people in groups; societies emerge from the interactions of people in communities. Interactions are at the heart of all this. Communities are a very useful conceptualization for virtual worlds, just as long as the fact they’re made up of people isn’t forgotten.

It’s a friendship thing.

An Analogy

The reason that virtual world designers find viewing the player base in terms of communities useful is four-fold.

• Community ties rank among the most powerful reasons for players to stay with a virtual world. They generate intangible content, but can be aided in tangible ways.

• The sheer number of players in some virtual worlds makes it impractical to consider players at a personal level. It’s easier to reach communities than individuals.

• Players frequently act in groups. If you look at them as individuals the whole time, you miss what’s going on (“you can’t see the woods for the trees”).

• Communities act analogously to players. Many of the things designers know about players can be applied to communities.

We’ve looked briefly at the first of these, and will look at it some more. The second item is purely pragmatic—we have to live with it, but it doesn’t really tell us anything. The third makes a good point; furthermore, because there is an existing body of work on this subject, designers can adapt and apply what has been learned in other fields to virtual worlds. The fourth item, which I’ll address now, is a way that designers can use work in their own field to think about communities.

Put simply, levels of community are analogous to stages of player progression. Look back at Figure 3.6:

• Players start as instinctives. They go in all directions at once to find the limits of what they can do. A community of interest behaves the same way, all members pushing their own interests to determine its boundaries.

• Next, players become learners. They embark on a process of discovery to find out more about what interests them.

A community of practice is similar, its members pooling what they know to increase the knowledge of the community as a whole.

• After this, players become doers. They apply what they have learned to better themselves. This is like a community of commitment, where members work together on projects for the benefit of the community, rather than for the (immediate) benefit of themselves.

• Finally, players become experts and communities become spiritual. Both have fully internalized their experiences.

This is only an analogy: Communities resemble players in some respects, but are very different in others. The two aren’t tied together, either—it’s perfectly possible to have scientist-type players in a spiritual community and hacker-type ones in a community of interest, for example. Communities may be defined by their members, but the reverse does not apply.

Knowing this connection between community development and player development, though, it’s possible to look at both with more enlightened eyes. Player development tracks, although they do show how players progress over time, are because of their origins more focused on what players want at each stage (rather than what should be provided for them to advance to the next stage). In contrast, levels of community are mainly to do with development—how to take the next step toward a spiritual community (rather than how to provide for players who are going to remain within a community at the same level for some time). Thus, designers should be aware that they should accommodate the stages and transition between those stages, whether considering community or player progression or both.

There’s one final observation we can make (if not actually use).

Player progression is closely connected with deepening immersion. Progression of communities through increasing levels should therefore, by analogy, be closely connected with immersion of the community (as an entity). How, though, can a virtual community be said to exhibit immersion? In what sense can a spiritual community be more “in” the virtual world than a community of interest? It can’t; but it can be said to be more in the real world than a community of interest, because it forms real bonds between real players.

Immersion puts the real world into the virtual; community puts the virtual world into the real.

That’s enough community theory for the purposes of this book, but there are plenty of places you can look if you want to learn more. For a short introduction to levels of community, read ethnographer Arian Ward’s succinct article, What is a Community? ¹. For a longer one, which discusses virtual world communities in terms of community studies in general, Chapter 6 of Lynn Cherny’s Conversation and Community ² is invaluable. For a psychological perspective of virtual communities (with particular reference to virtual worlds), explore John Suler’s superb ongoing hypertext book, The Psychology of Cyberspace ³. To learn more about managing virtual communities in general, consult Amy Jo Kim’s Community Building on the Web ⁴ or Jenny Preece’s Online Communities ⁵, both of which make reference to virtual worlds. If you just want a broad but thought-provoking overview of what virtual communities are, Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community ⁶ is still required reading.

Now let’s see if we can apply some of what we’ve learned here.