building, fostering and interacting; the new rules of journalism

September 25th, 2009

learning to manage communities can be a tricky business

I picked this up from a Jay Rosen tweet

Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

What does MMORG’s have to do with journalism? The answer according to the article is, everything.

MMORPGs don’t have much to offer in terms of developing the traditional journalism skills. These games can’t teach students how to vet sources, how to interview, how to copy edit, how to hit the streets and find stories.

What they can teach journalists is how to build, foster and interact with an online community. As news organizations and journalism schools struggle to find their way in the shifting, interactive landscape that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, the answers to many of their questions lie in the history of computer gaming.

The article mentions Richard Bartle, (website), (blog) one of the foremost experts on gaming and players. The article argues that it’s Bartle’s expertise where we can begin to learn about communities. Importantly Bartle made some key observations on player types,

The player types — Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers — lay the foundation for not only what elements need to be present within a game community (although this can easily be extrapolated for any community) but also what precautions and rules need to be in place in order for these communities to thrive.

This “simple taxonomy”, as Bartle refers to it, enables community managers to begin to quantify the actions within any system and subtly shift the environment to encourage different actions, ones that are more conducive to community building. Community designers could, as Bartle said, tinker with what the players could do, change the rules of the world, create a more interactive environment or build more direct action. (Bartle, 1996)

The article goes on to mention the seminal work of Dave Weinbrger, Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold

While each of those works examines communities ranging far outside the basic taxonomies, they each seem to agree on four basic principles for building communities and four basic rules for managing those communities. And that though these key thinkers were looking at different aspects of community, engagement, communication, technology etc., They did seem to come to a common point of view on some fundamental principals,

The four principles — Good Content, Simple Navigation, Simple Interfaces, Decentralized Controls (King, 2008) — align themselves with the Bartle’s Taxonomy in this way: The content is for achievers and explores, the navigation is for achievers, the interface is for socializers and the decentralized controls allows for the thwarting of killers.

The four rules — No Free Riding, Rules Compliance, Rewards, Ad-Hoc Growth (King, 2008) — not only offer guidelines for punishing Killers, but also for encouraging Achievers, Explorers and Socializers.

Which brings us onto community management – the community, a community, needs rules and it needs managing, the interface needs to be designed to encourage persistent interaction, for all key game player types. Just shoving stuff up online and hoping for the best, will not deliver the results one hopes for, I think is the key observation here.

Brad King author of the article makes therefore his summary,

In other words, the company treated the players as equal partners in the game process. They weren’t considered as an afterthought. They weren’t considered incidental to the process. They weren’t there to be the recipient of corporate-speak. They had a voice within the organization, a way to redress concerns and a way to provide constructive feedback that changed the way the developers upgraded the system.

That the game still continues, 12 years later, with more than 100,000 players is a testament to this system.

I rate this article highly, it has certainly helped me. It also in my opinion should be read by anyone wanting to study how to truly engage, one audience. All the hype about Social Media is such a poor substitute, to the key insights which underpin how and why people interact with each other in the networked participatory society.