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.