Effective talk: How gaming communities work,
Year of Talk: 2023
Part 1: Setting the Scene
As time goes by a person's commitment to something increases. Meaning they will become more engaged with the community. By the end of the process, they will be advocating for the game so more people can join it.
Engagement cycle: 4 main stages (Identity, Trust, Engagement, Reward). As the player/person completes a cycle it pushes them further into the commitment process.
Identity: This is the first step of the process is how the player/person identifies themselves concerning the community/culture. It can start simply like: “I like x games” or “I'm interested in certain genres”
Trust: When the player/person can interact with the community and the team they can build relationships and trust with them and become better integrated with the entire community.
Engagement/Participation: As the person slowly interacts and engages with different parts of the game and community they can encounter more areas they find interesting and feel more part of the community than before. This is the fundamental part of any community. A healthy community will have various amounts of people that are at different levels in the engagement path as you need people in your community making videos, reacting to different things, lurking, and so on.
Reward: When the person can be rewarded for their engagement and willingness to trust other people in the community then they can feel rewarded. Things like being noticed or a feeling of belonging. Give a dopamine hit which makes the brain think that they should do that more. Improving trust and a feeling of identity. Both intrinsic (Being part of a community, friendships) and extrinsic (Points, items, clothes, etc) reward options.
Many games allow for integrated identity and reward systems in them allowing for an easier time building communities around them.
What's wrong with gaming communities?
As communities became bigger there seemed to be a bigger group of more toxic players. Likely a byproduct of people caring for a game/studio a lot and when something goes bad they feel the best response is aggression and toxicity.
The route cause according to the presenter is an identity misalignment. This is when people get excited about a game and then realize that the game isn't matching their expectations. This is where the main problems with toxicity can occur. But as time passes and people get used to the game or expansion they understand what the studio initially intended and can enjoy it even more.
An example given by the presenter is a Facebook group called “A group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony.” In which people would act how they think and ant would act.
But as the group grew people started to complain about what the rules were and whether or not the mods were doing enough. Suddenly they fractionalized into smaller groups and became very toxic.
Meanwhile, the presenter moved to talk about how communities formed around Web3 and how they can be studied to learn about community interaction and improving a community. People would easily split themselves up into different subgroups that would best suit them. They saw that the reason many of these communities were able to stay close together while still being able to split into groups was that there was an extrinsic reward given to them and a reason to communicate/interact with each other.
A big problem that later evolved was the fact that many of the detractors started to appear as the money they had invested wasn't returning as much as they had hoped which meant that their trust in the product was reduced.
Final notes:
Communities are built on the fans for the games. Normally there is no other reason for these groups of people to meet up/hang out.
Engagement helps the teams understand what people think or are feeling. Can also help gather better information on what to do next.
Extrinsic motivation drastically helps grow a community as people can grow in that area continually.
Giving your community a purpose to work and interact with each other helps mend any misaligned expectations for the community or game. Having a purpose and giving that reason for people to interact can inadvertently get more positive engagement and interactions while also improving the extrinsic motivation and the members feel like they are fulfilling something.
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