Game Governance 2

Another story in pictures.

We left off at the BBS/Usenet era. Largely the practices that spawned there (FAQs, AMAs, community management, shareware → subscriptions) were brought over to game-specific forums.

Successor to game discussion Usenet groups

Chat, forums, find matches, discuss strategy

The first SWG developer chat / AMA in 2001.

Today devs take time out of their day to answer questions on Twitter/Reddit.

Mod Ash @JagexAsh

@TheLiTPotato57 I wouldn't rule it out - we have a sort of exile hive already, after all. But it's not something we're planning for this year, and after this year's desert focus I'd expect us to work on content for elsewhere in the game.

With increasing points of contact between studio and players, community management has taken on a larger role.

Warframe’s community director Forbes 30 under 30

Some takeaways from the video

• Community managers manage multiple channels (Discord, forum, Reddit, Twitch) to establish two-way communication between players and team. People like knowing what’s happening behind closed doors.

• Job is to make sure players feel heard.

• 8 FT Community Team vs 3M community members so talking to everyone is hard. Must establish 80/20 communication method - address the most common issues first.

“Games aren’t just a product anymore…they’re now communities.” Victoria Tran does community management for Kitfox Games, which has previously published games like Dwarf Fortress and is currently developing a handful more, including Boyfriend Dungeon… Community managers are often responsible for collecting feedback; advising developers and coordinating on update and marketing strategies; and building whole spaces from the ground up for fans to interact. It’s a job that involves a lot more than just tweeting.

Jay Castello - Verge

Some other good reads: Online Community Management: Communication Through Gamers, The biggest games in the world are only as successful as their communities

Summary

• Usenet/BBS → Game specific forums → Web2 (Reddit, Discord, Twitter, Twitch) gave teams access to community

• GaaS models especially required consistent updates for retention. New content was best developed by talking to the community

• Community managers who would provide two-way communication became increasingly important but diffusion of community across platforms and its sheer size made it difficult to aggregate feedback/sentiment and effectively manage the community.

Removing the Bottleneck

Hypothesis: to increase the signal ratio and a bottleneck of community manager capacity, games started to create institutions that would self-organize and interface with the developers. Eve CSM

The CSM will have regular online meetings with the Community Team and members of the EVE Online game development, access to selected internal sites, and a direct connection to various teams across the organization.

The CSM is a player elected, play run council that advises the CCP on issues related to “EVE development priorities and long term roadmap”, “discussing ideas, theory and design approaches for potential EVE Online features”, and “getting feedback on features in active development”.

Scalability through decentralization?

Meeting notes from CSM14. Read more of them here.

Lehdonvirta and Castronova believe that the council model deflects lobbying and hate mail from developers, is a better aggregation, filtering funnel, and helps build credibility in decision making.

Hypothesis: the introduction of a council model decreased centralization and complexity vs previous states. We will come back to this.

Hasu⚡️🤖 @hasufl

I'm deeply bearish on DAO governance. Thinking there may be an efficient frontier here for complexity + centralization

Though it still is a don’t do evil system.

Today council systems are quite common.

Unlike Eve where there are elections based on universal criteria, entry into the Round Table depends on meeting set objective criteria.

Blizzard reiterates the above reasons as their rationale for creating a WoW Council.

1. Want to zero in on the most nuanced player comments

2. Solving scalability issues of discussing feedback from 10,000s of people

Wow scrambling.

Their community council is application-based.

Most council models have councils simply as advisors. Differences are not in scope but more so in how they’re chosen.

• Election

• Application

• Quantifiable criteria

Summary

• I hypothesize that council models were created as self-organizing institutions that would function as aggregators/filters of community feedback to remove the bottleneck experienced by community managers

• Marginally increased decentralization decreased complexity, moving towards a more efficient frontier

• Council models differ in how members are chosen