[Image by Laurel Papworth]
Laurel Papworth, who runs The community crew, spoke at the ‘Multiplatform story telling: from idea to market’, 29 November 2011 at the State library of Victoria, Melbourne. (You can download her beaut slides from slideshow.net or laurelpapworth.com.)
She gives some pertinent pointers about how to build an online community:
- Why why why? Need to find the story/rational behind the property if you want to build community
- What are the social spaces in your online community?
- Identity and influences – how do individuals get standing and reputation? You need to have good reputation management mechanisms. Know thy social media influencers, and how their tweets etc propagate over time through social media platforms (I guess one studies Google analytics and Twitter analytics, Google + big names?)
- Etiquette and games – how do I behave? Different communities can promote different behaviours. The key thing about etiquette and games is not to tell people in FAQs how they can behave. The gamifying of communities is how we manage behaviours. Reward systems can encourage behaviours.
- Campaigns and events – entertain me. Communities get bored, so they’re asking you to create a campaign. Rituals and rites of passage to enter subgroups – work your way into the influencers’ groups, and understand how they do things differently.
Papworth referred to Alice Worlds and Dorothy Worlds. A Dorothy world has the player character dumped into a site and they have to follow the yellow brick road. Everything drives the character towards an end-game story. (EG, WoW still going after 7 years with 16000 stories with teams and teams of story writers.)
So what is an Alice world? Papworth left this one dangling, so I’ve done my own definition:
“I should like to look all around me first, if I might.”
“You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,” said the Sheep; “but you can’t look all around you — unless you’ve got eyes at the back of your head.”
Lewis Carrol
So I figure its more explorative. No clear end point. The journey, etc.
Anyway, I just found some cool looking create-your-own-world software called, appropriately enough, Alice world. I must admit, as far as machinima goes it doesn’t look as smooth as doing it in Second Life, etc. But I think there’s a new release, they’re still developing it. And its free! Here’s someone’s effort:
