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.
Today devs take time out of their day to answer questions on Twitter/Reddit.
With increasing points of contact between studio and players, community management has taken on a larger role.
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.
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
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?
Hypothesis: the introduction of a council model decreased centralization and complexity vs previous states. We will come back to this.
Today council systems are quite common.
Blizzard reiterates the above reasons as their rationale for creating a WoW Council.
Want to zero in on the most nuanced player comments
Solving scalability issues of discussing feedback from 10,000s of people
Wow scrambling.
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
