MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: Thesky isfalling?)

[Sean Howard]

"Paul Schwanz" <pschwanz at comcast.net> wrote:

> So the definition of a community includes a restriction that there
> can be no sub-communities?  That seems rather arbitrary to me.

It can, and does. However, we must use a different definition that
has smaller boundaries to be useful. If we call a community of
individuals and a community of communities a "community", we must
always clarify - and when we don't, confusion ensues.

The best example I can think of is with my webcomic, which uses
original pixel art. However, the most people just consider it an
"original art sprite comic" (sprite comics being the ones which
steal art from games, like 8-Bit Theater or Bob & George). The
problem was, everyone said "Sprite comics suck... unless they have
original art". Or there would be discussions about the legality of
using Final Fantasy sprites for personal gain, and people would fail
to make the distinction and the wrong comics would be damned for the
wrong reasons.

I don't care if we call them "abstract communities", "super
communities", "community communities" or what, but if we are talking
about different things, we need to call them different names. We
can't call everything a community because that's useless. Worse than
useless. It's confusing.

> With that sort of restriction, I doubt that communities could grow
> past 10 or so members.  My town must not be a community because
> their are sub-divisions, those sub-divisions can't be communities
> because they contain families, and even extended families cannot
> be communities because they can be sub-divided into immediate
> families.

Notice how you used different words for all those divisions? How
confusing would it have been if you had said "My town has towns,
which themselves have towns, and inside those town, more towns".

My argument is that when we are talking about game design, we are
primarily focused on communities of individual people. I can't think
of a single game, MMORPG or otherwise, which has design decisions
that concern communities of communities. Maybe that's not how it
should be. I don't know. But when we talk about how the player
interacts with the game's community, we aren't talking about their
contributions to the social structure of the entire population. For
that, we need to talk about a larger piece than one person, but
smaller piece than the whole pie.

> It seems to me a much more reasonable perspective would be that
> there is a sort of heirarchy of social groupings.

That's fine. As long as each box in the graph has a different
description.  I'd even be happy with each box being a community,
with a more distinct title for each level.

- Sean Howard
www.squidi.net
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