[MUD-Dev] The Root of the Tree (was NEWS: Why Virtual Worlds ...)

[David Kennerly]

Damien wrote:!

> Hmm.  FOLDOC expands CMC to "Computer Mediated Communication", so
> probably the former.

> However, I don't see what public goods have to do with
> communities.  There are numerous examples of communities which
> have formed around communications systems--The Well is probably
> one of the better known ones.  I'm a user of a chat system/CMC
> which has a community going back over 18 years.

Communities spring up around many subjects and common interests.
Nonetheless, public goods define the domain in which the community
exists.  Unlike a privately owned good, in many systems the public
good is up for grabs, usually by whoever gets there first.
Generically, if the public goods are reputation tokens that users
may collect through skill, then the community exists inside of the
system.  In many MMPs, the mobs are public goods that dispense
experience point tokens, which increments the player up the
system-defined social ladder.  A persistent computer system with
sufficient public goods, and participants, is a computer-mediated
community.

If there are no public goods of any kind in the system, then the
community only exists outside of the system.  The Sims and
Counterstrike have huge communities, but the game The Sims and the
game Counterstrike, are not computer-mediated communities.  Some
feature-rich fansites of these games are computer-mediated
communities.  The community, for these, exists because there are
public goods outside of the games which may be shared, such as home
page screen space, file server bandwidth, and mods.

> What matters is that people understand what a word means.

That is the point.  "Virtual world" is a prime example.  Many don't
know what the term means.  Even instructors substitute a hodge podge
of hype where a defintion ought to be.

David

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