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.