Online community and culture wars: What do we know?
What's been going on with the gaming community? Raph Koster, Gordon Walton and Rich Vogel are veterans of the online gaming space, and know a thing or two about how groups form and behave on the internet. At GDC, the three presented important findings for community managers about how to gain control over an increasingly depressing work environment.
We now live in an age where the internet filters results for you based on assumptions about what you're like drawn from geographic location or other patterns. This creates a phenomenon called a "filter bubble," says Koster, where increasingly one's perception of the world is led by online targeting. Your average online user will increasingly see only those news sources and even political candidates that agree with their own views -- and anyone who's ever Facebook-blocked a relative with offensive political views has become complicit in this sort of filtering.
In this climate, says Koster, the common context shared by disparate groups begins to erode, and homogenous groups crystallize. "As noble as we wish we are, we're not -- given the choice, people hang out with people like them," says Koster.
"Given a limited population, over time, not only will we [form]groups that are like us, but the larger group will exterminate the other one," he says. "In simulations, that's what happens: They literally commit genocide, they literally chase everyone else out of the room. It's a distasteful fact about human nature, and if our definition about who we are is rigid, then you're going to have that conflict."
People tend to make assumptions about behavior based on character, when in fact behavior is contextual and based on complex and deeply-felt beliefs. The theory goes that people are most likely to treat another person well when they feel they will see that person again. Trust is established through repeated interactions.
"This is how the world works, and some of this is uncomfortable. We doing community management have to deal with that, and part of the problem is that a lot of this has changed out from under the best practices we talked about 14 years ago," Koster says. "A lot of the things we take for granted as best practices just don't work anymore."
For example, look at what free to play systems have done to the idea of persistent identity in games -- it's rooted in pulling in as many accounts as possible and churning through those that won't turn into paying users, and each time you log in you're part of a different group, with no attachment to your online identity or that of others.
"Without friction of some type, you end up in a place where it's difficult to create a peaceful community," says Walton.
"You can do anything you pretty much want, and that's a problem for communities in free-to-play," adds Vogel.
Our previous ideas about managing online communities or players were rooted in that persistence, the barrier to entry for account creation and maintenance, and systems of reputation and reward for good practices. Those elements are the "good fences that make good neighbors," as the saying goes. If players don't need to be invested in what others think of them, they're less likely to do their part to keep a community healthy.
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Online community and culture wars: What do we know?