The BigDog asks these interesting questions — several of which have been on my mind lately.
CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » Online Community Megalopoli
[W]hat sorts of online community based things do you participate in? How many are outside your organization? What is your level of involvement? What would make one something that will sustain your interest.
I’ve been participating in online communities since before there was web, really. It started out with IRC in the late 80s and early 90′s then moved into the text based MUDs, MUSHes, and MUSEs. Tapped-In is an evolved version of MOO with a graphical component layered on top. What made those communities work — and there were often two or three hundred people at a time online — was that there was “something to do” and it was generally more fun to do it in a groups. In MUDs the objective is to slay beasts, gain treasure, and increase skills — sorta like the old Zork games on steroids. In MUSE/MUSH/MOO environments the objective was to create fantastic worlds and experiences — like writing your own interactive novels. Of course, making them ‘cool’ and sharing them with your friends was key.
About 8 years ago, I started played MMORPGs like Doom, RailRoad Tycoon, and a couple others (no, not Everquest), but those communities, while allegedly more “engaging,” lacked the quintiessntial characteristic of ‘community’ that was found in the old text based games. I believe that the nature of the games — jump onto a server and see who you can spank — actually precluded that kind of community. And I, frankly, lost interest. I haven’t followed that branch into the Everquest/Runequest/Halo/WoW crowd so perhaps somebody else can comment there.
About 5 years ago, I started playing in VRML communities — mostly Blaxxun-based communities but also with forays into There.com and SecondLife. There.com and SecondLife held no real draw – while there were things to do, few of the things were really that interesting. I don’t need a 3d avatar and fat pipes to chat. A simple text based client does that fine. The communities that drew me in, tho, were the ones where I was able to create my own objects and spaces for the world. SecondLife does allow that now, but I just can’t get into the “you pay us for the privilege of creating our content” model — which was the same problem that There.com had. (Disclaimer: I’ve dropped both those communities so I’m not sure of the current state of economic development in either of them.)
The more open VRML worlds — iCity, CyberTown, and Oddessey — held more interest because you didn’t need to pay to create content. With some simple tools, creating 3d objects — furnishings, sculpture, artworks, and even avatars — was possible and actively pursued. The worlds provided “something to do.” And the more you did it, the better you got at it and the more fun it was to do.
For the last three years, I’ve been playing in the web-based spaces and finding them, largely, less satisfying because they lack the direct person-to-person communications. Recently, players have been linking up over MSN and Yahoo Messengers to talk to each other while they play. There’s a serious opportunity there to enable live chat — text or audio — into the web based games like BlackNova Trader or Alien Assault or even Legends of the Green Dragon.
Now, as far as online professional communities. Bleh.
I joined TappedIn years ago — back in the MOO days, but the opportunities to DO stuff there — well, I never found them. For a long time I participated in Diversity University which was more in the spirit of the original LambdaMOOs, but I seemed to be there alone a lot. There’s not much point in being the only person in a multi-user world.
Email lists appear to be the most active “community” with some interesting discussions happening on DEOS-L and WWWEDU. While I appreciate that this “old school tech” isn’t as sexy as some of the new stuff, it’s got the advantage of always having “something to do.” Yes, it gets frustrating dealing with the pomposity and self-righteousness, but I’m working on controlling my more egregious excesses there.
That covers most of the first couple of questions. And you’ll note that NONE of these communities are within any sphere of my professional organizations. The University as a whole has no sense of online community nor does the department. My professional group would like to think of itself as a community, but the online component of the community is limited to 1% of the membership and scattered pretty broadly. So from that perspective, none of my “organizations” have online communities for me to participate in.
What would make a community something that would sustain my interest?
- Activity: There has to be an active core (corps) of members who participate in whatever the community is. Blog posts, message threads, email messages, whatever. There has to be something happening there everytime I go
- Intereseting: Whatever we do it has to be something I’m either interested in or executed in an interesting way. Yet another discussion on the utility of distance education or of computers in the classroom is NOT interesting. It works, We need them. Move on. Let’s talk about something else? Like “What do we do when they close all the schools?”
- Easy: If I need to actually USE my PhD just to log in, I’m not gonna do it.
- Free: not just cheap. FREE. If I have to pay to find out I don’t like anybody there, I’m not going to find out. Now, that’s not to say I might not contribute to the cause down the road. I’m cheap, but I also believe in paying for value one way or another.
That’s more than enough for one reply. I hope the BigDog finds this useful.
Links:
MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs
VRML Worlds
April 12th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
The BigDog is wagging his tail. Thanks very much for sharing your range of experiences, vaster than my own. I did waste most of my freshman year in programming getting distracted by dungeon like games hidden on the mainframe.
I am tuning in to the parts you wrote that speak more to the experiences of the community activity over what it looks like.does. Maybe that is harder to focus on these days when the media surrounds us, and we have less time to plunk into YAC (Yet Another Community).
I am just starting to get involved in a project takng place in SL in my new job, and it is a rather amazing place that my new employer is creating there. I can see why just the casual wandered would be less than enthralles with the mundane and street level activity one finds there (we have a “private” island). I am cautious about the amount of technical/navigation overhead needed to become functional in SL.
It’s not the tools, not the tools, not the tools, right?
April 13th, 2006 at 5:22 am
Precisely! It’s not the tools you use, but how you use them.
To paraphrase Forest Gump, “Community is as community does.”
As I look back over the last decade and a half of online community involvement, the common threads are:
One of the points that I keep trying to make about online communities is that the use of the term “virtual” in this case (as in virtual community) refers to the special meaning of “virtual” as “communication mediated by computers and/or electronic networks.” While the avatar may be non-corporeal, the person at the keyboard is very real. The aggregated activity of all those real people is what provides the environment within which community might develop.
June 6th, 2006 at 1:36 am
Nathan and Alan,
An interesting exchange, especially the way Nathan is sharing from his experience.
These are the questions that I am currently asking as a Helpdesk Volunteer (occassional: March to October when the times are auspicious) at Tapped In.
Why do I still (2001-2006) go? To meet with the real people there, who are really concerned with the vocation of teacher. Over that period I have a real sense of communication with a number of participants. I would have liked to have continued to explore a developing relationship with others, but some of my constraints, as well as their constraints have impeded – like it does in any real relationship.
What would I like to be involved in, and what would draw me more? (I have tossed around disengaging from time to time, when the interactions seem to plateau at a certain point.) The move to another level of engagement. I guess I will be able to describe it more when I have been there. At the moment I am still operating on my wish fulfilment energy. Engaging with Nathan here, as well as there, might be part of that kind of move.