Building a Community: Common Goals
Creating a community from scratch is a hard task and it is even harder if you do not share a goal. There are plenty of very human reasons that prevent a group from acting as a community. Selfishness, irrational fears, dispositions, jealousy, - the list of human errors that make it hard to get along is pretty big. When you break it down this means that individuals have a hard time getting along for an extended period of time. I guess it is human nature, and that is fine; if we got along all the time things would never be very interesting.
However if you are trying to build a community where people need to interact and contribute you have to get past all of those human tendencies. If there is a common goal or vision shared by a community it is easier to get past the normal human fallacies. The community becomes a kind of buffer if the bond is strong enough between people. For instance I might be jealous that I always get beat by certain players, and that might even make me mad, but I know that it would be foolish to act like a jerk and curse someone out online because I could be ostracized by the community. Now of course some people just don’t care about being ostracized or rules in general but there is still a large number that do. I am assuming that there is at least some common morality shared by individuals in this case.
The best shared goal is often just having fun together. In fact that is the best goal in my opinion. If we were not put on Earth to have fun, well I don’t so many people would stick around. Playing games with people you know or people you don’t know is a great way to socialize and spend your time. Games are actually an easy thing to build a community around compared to something like sorting trash, or breaking rocks. When having fun is the goal you can focus people to come together and overcome some of those human errors, and start building a community.
When it comes to our community we are lucky because most of the people are already there with the goal to have fun. Not only that put RTS games in general work better when people communicate and work as a team. These are 2 great bonuses when building a community. Even when the game is not out yet, such as Halo Wars, fans get together and do Fan Fiction, Forum RPG’s, and find other fun ways to pass the time. All of that builds the community into something better.
Meet your Moderator: Paragon
If you have posted on the forums at AgeCommunity.com it has been under the watchful eye of Paragon. He keeps the peace and keeps thing organized on the forums, which is no easy task considering the amount of traffic we get. To get a closer look at the man inside the forums, I asked him some questions.
How long have you worked for Ensemble Studios?
I have worked for ES for over seven years in two blocks. The first block I was a tester on Age of Mythology the Titans expansion, and early versions of Age of Empires 3, before I took a break from the game industry. In 2005 I returned to ES and have been working with the Live team ever since.
Tell us about your gaming past. What are some of your favorite games?
We had an Atari 2600 for while, but I don’t think I was really hooked on games until I started playing text adventure games on my Atari 400 computer. Since then I have played hundreds of computer and video games some good - some bad, some terrible, and some great.
I have always been fond of computer RPGs and have probably played more hours of that genre of game than any other. A few of my favorites are; Ultima 3, Star Flight, Wasteland, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout , Planescape:Torment, Everquest, and World of Warcraft.
Tell us about an average day moderating here at Ensemble.
Most of my day is spent reading; emails, forum posts, and chats. I usually start the day by looking for chat logs from the previous evening, checking for abuse offenders. Then move on to private messages and email, which I can simply cannot reply to all of. After that is time to start reading and reacting to forum posts; this is where I spend most of my time.
What has been your weirdest experience here as a Moderator.
I cannot recall any weird experiences, there have been a few funny ones.
One example is when I suspended one our programmers for spamming in the chat channels. It was early in the morning, he was logged in with a non-employee account and was doing some testing, aka. Spamming. When he did not reply to me after I asked him to stop, I suspended the account.
A few seconds later I get an IM from the actual person asking if the servers just went down because he cannot log in. We then spent the next several minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem, before we put together what really happened.
How do you try and make AgeCommunity.com, HaloWars.com, and ESO a safe and fun place to hang out?
First, on all of them I try to not just be a “rule keeper”, but one of them. This is has become more difficult as Age 3 has grown and as Halo Wars moves toward launch. There are simply so many more posts to read and issues to react to.
Second, I try to quickly react to abusive situations by removing/locking the posts, and issuing a response. This, of course, reduces the time I have to simply post and interact with the members.
Which is why, I also try to encouraging these communities to help police themselves, by using the reporting options available.
Do you have a philosophy about moderating?
I started with the idea that these communities should be places to discuss the games they are built around and if something would have offended my grandmother, it should not be on there.
You started helping out banning cheaters recently. How do you like that?
It is interesting and sort of sad.
I have always been helping, by guiding people to abuse and forwarding reports, so hearing about cheating is not new. Though now I am the one of those whom all the reports come to, and I am shocked at two things; the number of people that accuse others with no evidence at all, and the number of people trying to cheat.
Lastly, who would win in a fight, you or a gorilla?
I am not ashamed to admit, the gorilla. Hands down.
The Wilhelm Scream and Halo Wars
Watching movies as a kid I would pick up on odd details, sounds particularly. When I was watching the latest Indiana Jones movie in the theaters I noticed that when the doors opened on Hangar 51, it was the same sound effect from the very first Star Wars when Darth Vader appears in the doorway. This sound has been used before in other movies as well (most of the Star Wars and Indian Jones movies have it somewhere as well as some of the Lucas Arts adventure games).
Well Halo Wars is no exception to the rule. While I was watching the 5 Long Years trailer I noticed a peculiar sound about 47 seconds into the movie.
The Wilhelm scream has a very fun and interesting legacy in film. It is nice to see it make the transition into games.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PxALy22utc&feature=related
Pictures from Ensemble
This is our Play-Test guardian. He makes sure everyone is playing games and having fun or at least that they are faking it enough not to anger the other players.
The Artist Hall has a bunch of awesome art hanging in it, as well as having a cool open door design. You can seal yourself into the individual art caves but you can also leave the cave door open to yell at the other inhabitants in this bizarre hallway. Fun fact – Most artist are nocturnal only leaving the caves for food and recreation at dusk.
Next Time : Temporary Communities, more moderators and being anonymous