The Future of Game Communities, and How We Avoid It

[Music] thank you how we going it's 3 P.M on a Thursday are we okay we're exhausted we are we're all so exhausted but we're gonna make it through we're gonna make it through by talking about the hellish future we're about to embark on what a great Thursday afternoon discussion topic so I'm not going to take up 10 of the 30 minutes I have talking about my career background um safe to say I'm in Community Management terms ancient um I'd love to chat if you if you want to chat about my background later on more than happy to do that I'm going to spend the time talking about Community Management and communities in general instead so in order to understand where we're going

we've got to kind of understand where we're at currently so at first we're gonna we're gonna set up the scene we're going to understand what's going on in order to kind of understand it truly we're gonna look at some Community theory in general um I think part of understanding the problem at hand is understanding the whys behind Community Management in general I refuse to elaborate on this part you're going to find out when we get there and then we're going to end on a slightly hopeful note because I'm not going to ruin your entire days so we're going to talk about some things that we can do about the apocalypse that's coming so I'm really really sorry to anybody who has come into this talk expecting a happy future um if you have spent any time on the internet whatsoever you probably predicted this was like a dystopian nightmare conversation um I think in the year 2020 they ran a

survey of community managers in the industry and 60 of them had said that jobs had become overwhelmingly difficult when I talk to my community manager Powers about that they're like only 60. um I also saw a survey where 70 of the industry has experienced toxicity or they had witnessed it firsthand and my reaction was only 70. um I think the fact that we all collectively understand that toxicity is a problem it goes without saying but I think the fact that we've accepted it as a fact is something that's really worth looking into and it's really worth being concerned about so the tldr of this is I think our community managers have become human meat shields for lack of a better world um and you know the dystopian future that I'm talking about it's kind of already here um you know maybe we can make it better but it's actually going to require an

understanding of what's happening right now and where we're at right now um so that we can understand how to fix what's broken let's do that so I'm not going to spend too long in this slide because I think that this is a resource that people can actually find for themselves cmx Hub is a wonderful resource for Community managers everywhere and it's really where I got a lot of my my start in understanding Community Theory but this is the commitment curve just going to take a quick sip of water all right so the idea is over time a member of a community's level of commitment is going to go up an intern so are their actions as well so early on when you've just joined a community you're going to be taking low effort actions you're just going to be consuming and then eventually over time the idea is as you you become more engaged within that Community you're going to go up and become more engaged and have more

commitment so right at the beginning you've obviously got aware you know maybe they just browse Reddit forums and they're looking at things um they know who you are but there's not much more than that going on and then right at the top you've got Advocate also known as a super fan or a whale or whatever you want to call them you know they're really contributing um you know with user generated content they're contributing with big level conversations as a community manager the way to boil down someone's role as a community manager is to pull people up this funnel you'll notice there's the flip side of this commitment curve disinterested which is you know it's pretty natural that's going to happen here and there and then you've got detractors um we've got lots of names for detractors um I'm going to leave it up to you and your imagination to think of the best word for detractor um this is a tldr if you don't like graphs but you learn through memes this is this is how I personally learn

um so now we've kind of understood the commitment curve but how do we actually get people to become Advocates you know how do how does that process actually happen um and that's through something called the engagement cycle so really good because it's actually a cycle sometimes I see things that aren't cycles and I'm like that doesn't make sense but the idea is in order to remember to feel a strong sense of community and be really aligned within their Community they're going to cycle through these four stages repeatedly and every time they cycle through that stage it's going to make them more committed to the community so they're going up that curve by completing this cycle every single time they do that the intensity of the cycle is going to increase they're going to be taking higher action each time they go through it the thing that I find really interesting about Community Management in general is this is actually a natural behavior cycle this is not something that we're creating ourselves certainly

Community managers will do things to help that cycle Move Along um and you know I'll take you through each one step by step and you'll you'll see where the points are where Community managers tend to plug in but this is natural this is this is happening every day in any communities that have formed both digitally and not digitally it's part of who we are as people but let's break down the stages one at a time so first we have identity um you know the idea with this one is the members identity is going to align with the identity of the community so when someone decides to join a new community easiest one is let's say they're a Fallout fan and they want to join a Fallout Community seeing a community that's signposted in a way that aligns with how they see themselves is going to be why they join after they join Over time it's really interesting because the identity of the individual is going to start to conform with the identity of the community as a whole the easiest way to see when that's starting

to happen is when people say we instead of I and things like that that they're going to become way more likely to defend and Advocate and participate within a community if it's really strongly aligned with their personal sense of identity and you know if you think about the super fans that you already have in your communities you know this to be true this is already happening and then we have trust so the idea of this is the member develops trust in other members and also the community as a whole I think this one's really interesting because it's in the community as a whole but it's also in specific members of a community and they both fuel each other so when someone first presented with the opportunity to participate they're often brought in by someone who they know and trust already or they see that there are prominent people within that community that are already there that they trust and understand and maybe

they see the interactions in that community at a face level and they go yes this makes sense this is the kind of content I want to see or I want to be a part of whatever it is they may be I think that the trust comes from the reputation of the community itself or from existing trusts of the people within it um you know we we throw words like legitimacy and authenticity and genuine around all the time and all of those words and all those actions really boil down to the idea of trust within a community and if they don't have those things this is how a lot of people are becoming deterred from being a part of a community then we've got engagement so it's also called participation depending on on what kind of community Theory you're looking at but the idea is that they're taking some sort of action they're participating in some way um and you can't have a community without this obviously I think it's interesting as well because you can't have a community without having

different levels of participation as well if you had a community full of people that were just consuming and not actually creating content or being a part of things in a really active way then you're not going to see a lot of Engagement and similarly if you have a community full of Advocates you're not going to have many people consuming in in low-level ways which actually helps to grow a community um you know as people become more engaged as per the commitment curve obviously the kind of Engagement they're going to be doing is going to become more and more intense over time so you you start off I think I said reading Reddit posts and then you go on up to streaming a game on Twitch that's obviously different levels of Engagement and then finally you've got reward so the idea of this one is that the member gets value from their participation and it makes them want to experience it again and this is the last stage in the cycle and it's the most important one as well it's what actually makes it a cycle because it reward actually releases

dopamine in our brains tells our body that it was a really good experience makes us want to do it again the rewards actually reinforcing the identity and it also makes us trust things more which obviously drives us to create more engagement because we know we'll get more rewards in the future typically the kinds of rewards that you see within a community can be both intrinsic and extrinsic and that's spoiler alert really important write that down things like swag things like points Facebook has just rolled out for groups those are examples of extrinsic rewards and then you've got intrinsic rewards like a sense of belonging status within a community nice feelings Etc both of them are do have a role within a community but reward as a whole is definitely the most important step here so I participate in a lot of more broad

Community Management industry events and whenever I'm participating in them a lot of other community Managers from other Industries will come up to me and talk to me about how the games industry has the Vanguard in terms of Community Management how we've always been a few steps ahead of everybody how we've always really been on the top of Trends and and how to develop things and I think yes obviously we have a stack of really really talented Community managers in this industry but I also think it goes beyond that and I think that it's because the mechanism of games themselves have been built in with identity and reward as part of from the very beginning the underlying concepts of games themselves so it makes so much sense that once you're building communities on those things your communities are going to be supercharged um so one of the things that I started seeing pretty early on in my career was

the more heavily engaged a community was you saw a huge increase in the amount of detractors that existed and at first I was of the opinion that it really just boiled down to the product itself um you know I've worked on games that came out didn't do very well had a lot of people hating on them um I think we've all been there we've all seen detractors and I thought that it was a certain level of inevitability um but then I kind of saw a Counterpoint to that in that Sherlock Holmes actually became the CounterPoint in the 1800s uh author Kernan Doyle actually killed off homes not sure what that noise is but it sounds ominous um so anyway Holmes got killed off and the fans of Sherlock Holmes were devastated they they rallied together they wore black armbands on the streets they wrote eulogies for homes and sent them as complaint letters to the editor

like they went absolutely ballistic 20 000 People canceled their subscriptions and eventually they they retired it and brought homes back obviously um and I think that that was one of the first examples of a community really showing detractive behavior and it kind of really went beyond just it being a bad product um it's also interesting to see how similar communities operate these days so I moved towards more looking at it as like a sliding scale like I've got up here so the more people care the more likely they are to hate and therefore it's inevitable that you'll see more detractors when you have lots of people loving your product but over the past few months I've actually kind of thought about that more deeply and it doesn't actually answer the question of why it kind of goes yeah cool well that's a thing I guess that we've got lots of people that like it

there for lots of people that hate it but why it doesn't make sense um what I've come to the conclusion of is it's ultimately an identity promise that has gone unfulfilled so identity misalignment is where I really think it boils down to in terms of people becoming detractors so this is completely unrelated to Community Management in its entirety this is something called cycle has anyone heard of it few people Okay cool so this is all about the adoption of new technology and again nothing really to do with Community Management whatsoever but I find it interesting how you can see similarities in the way that communities are behaving because at the end of the day it's all just human behavior so you start off with initial hype so inflated expectations someone's like this is really cool I love this this is awesome and then you get a huge dip once people realize their expectations aren't

aligning with reality and what you see with tech adoption that we're not seeing in communities is you have this slope of Enlightenment which is the most video game sounding ever but that's fine um you you understand the purpose of the technology you understand why it's there you have a better understanding of how it can help you and then you move into a plateau of productivity which again sounds hilarious um so what I think taking that model this is how I see communities so you still see that Peak based on that really high engagement that initial oh man this is really cool this is hype I want to get involved this community looks great but then you see identity misalignment of people being like this doesn't serve the needs that I thought it was going to serve because it's impossible right you can't have a group that of 800 000 people that all have different identities and have those identity needs met and suddenly you

start to see conflict so typically you see people becoming attracted to a group because it appears to fulfill their identity needs and that identity creates that strong engagement and that those identity engagement go hand in hand eventually becomes too big too many different expectations you start to see people withdrawing at the best case scenario it's withdrawal but what we've all seen is toxicity it's people causing drama with each other as people calling other people out it's people being upset at the mods for overreaching or underreaching or whatever it is may be so I wanted to find an example of this happening in communities digitally and I wanted to kind of be as broad as possible and luckily for me the year 2020 we all went a little bit insane um and we there was a group that started called a group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony

please note the 1.8 million members 2020 was a wild ride so the idea of a group where we all pretend to be ants in an ant colony is you pretend to be an ant someone will post something and related and people will respond the way that I imagine an ant would on the internet so you do things like fight dig lift and that's it there's no other way that you engage that's all it is and you think surely something like this couldn't create drama you'd be wrong all of a sudden there were BuzzFeed articles everyone was like huh this is hilarious hype Rose 1.8 million people joined the group all of a sudden they were doing raids on other posting groups and so they'd go into the Marvel fan club and start

saying lift bite and people would be like what is happening but suddenly there were all these people with different political backgrounds different interests entirely all grouped together under a very flimsy identity connection it was it was really reaching um suddenly there was drama across the board mods were accused of overreaching mods were accused of underreaching people were really upset about a lot of different things because their personal identity needs weren't being met Tale As Old As Time the ants became racist somehow Splinter groups formed suddenly there were like fire ant colonies where they were like all we do is bite and that's it it was it was a lot there was a lot of stuff happening but again you're seeing this cycle in action toxicity was pulling in suddenly there's about 10 different ant colony groups that you can

join on Facebook currently none of them are great I'm gonna be really honest it's a controversial away from ants for a second um as a community manager like I said earlier games were kind of looked at as the Vanguard of Community Management but what I was starting to see over the past couple of years is I was seeing web 3 games and games communities with these insanely High engagement numbers and all these people were like really dedicated to their respective platforms they had these discords that were just insanely organized and I looked at it and I go and I thought to myself not really a big fan of web3 but I really want to understand why they have such supercharged communities and so I joined I lasted six months but I understood the problem I don't think that it's the problem but I think that it's a really good symptom of what is happening collectively to our

industry right now um I think the thing to be really thoughtful of and mindful of as we go on here is thinking about web 3 as an extension of how communities are forming so the game that I worked on when I was at the web 3 company the way that it worked is we separated players out into different categories the players themselves and then earners and then investors so it there was like three different categories and it was very curious because the the players themselves sorted themselves into those categories too we were then treating our communities as if we would in a traditional company so we would have The Advocates that we talked that we would talk to and we would we would have special connections with but those people were also investors and so it was really really interesting from a community perspective the problem that I began to see was the reason that these communities

were so supercharged was because there was extrinsic reward involved so these earners and these investors were in web 3 communities because they saw a speculative value um interestingly during my time there I saw entire marketing strategies being built with the communities themselves being the product that they were building and so Community teams were among the most important to a web free company because essentially if your community wasn't engaged and wasn't rallying behind your game or your product the value of that game was essentially nothing I want to take a step back for a second though because we like to look at what three as oh this is this is an extrinsic value problem but it's happening right now in our games if you look at even simple thing like an emote back in the day of mud dungeons emoticons were this useful

tool that you could use in order to communicate with other people but now we're selling them as part of subscription packages on Twitch it's being something that extrinsic value is not just a web 3 thing it's happening right now with all of us but yeah back to nft game projects being only as valuable as as the engagement of the community around it can anybody begin to predict what I started to see while I was at my time as in community at web 3. no one all right let's go so this is that commitment curve that I showed you earlier and this is what it looks like in web 3 communities um so I worked on the Fallout 76 launch in the community team at Bethesda and my time six months at the wemp3 community was infinitely worse than the worst day at Fallout 76's launch every single day the detractors not only

we're unhappy because they had identity misalignment but also the value that they'd put in and the money that they'd spent wasn't seeing speculative returns and they weren't seeing outcomes from the money that they had invested and so it became way more than just game I hate you it was you're also not making me the money that I was promised um so let's take a step back so we're increasingly building our communities based on one thing so for web 3 it's reward it's that extrinsic value for a lot of us in the games industry it's fandom it's identity we're building our entire communities based on that and that alone and no purpose for the communities exist other than creating a fandom for fandom's sake or even worse for commercial outcomes

engagement means more eyeballs for the algorithm which means more Impressions which means more sales conversions we're having Community teams that are sat within marketing teams that have kpis of needing to extract value from our communities we need to get the money and return on investment anytime we use extrinsic motivation as a motivate Vader it's supercharging this cycle it's making things move way faster and we do what's fast we do what gets us the biggest results the quickest because that's what makes sense but what I think this ultimately means is that we're not building any of our communities for trust at all it's just not necessary when you don't have trust you have communities that are not just toxic but they're built to be toxic toxicity is the underlying tone

so we've seen this commodification happen as a way to legitimize Community Management as a whole I I remember when I first started justifying my job in the first place I was thinking look at all this engagement look at all this awesome hype that we're receiving but I think what I'm seeing with the identity misalignment cycle it's happening to a broader digital industry at large and I know that I came here to talk about the future of community imagine but I'm actually not a fortune teller I don't know for sure but what I can say is it's already not good and it's probably going to get worse we've tried to shortcut and commodify what's supposed to be natural human behavior and a natural human cycle and we've tried to make it commodified and it's come at the cost of trust within our communities so looking at that cycle again I think I've worked it out I think I've worked out what we can be doing um I believe our communities are actually missing a key step and that's

purpose if our communities were actually built around purpose suddenly identity misalignment isn't quite the devastating blow that it would have been otherwise because we've built in the slope of purpose which I think is very fitting it negates that spiral into toxicity somewhat I'm going to show a case study because I feel like case studies are more important and I'm about to reveal myself here as an Australian apologies in advance so this is my favorite Facebook community of all time it's snake identification Australia instead of being a group built around fandom I.E snake appreciation Australia or whatever it would be it's what I like to call a purpose-led community it has a singular purpose identify the snakes so this is how it works you're set up as either an approved idea or a non-approved idea you're one of the two things when you first join every

comment you post you have to say who you are basically you can go in people will post photos of a snake and go hey what snake is this you can guess as a non-approved idea you can be like I think it's an eastern brown snake hashtag non-approved idea and then you'll have somebody trustwise that'll come in as an approved idea and say who what it really is from an engagement perspective you've got two types of people people that just appreciate snakes and think they're cool a lot of people that are afraid of them and want to get rid of their fear but then in terms of the snake appreciation Factor they've got a big old group of people that are snake nerds that love to talk about snakes they've got their own little group chat where they they talk about the ins and outs of snakes from a reward perspective there's two different types and they're both intrinsic very important my favorite reward in the world is when you guess a snake as a non-approved idea and then

your guess was accurate and you are a genius the amount of times I've managed to correctly guess what the snake was and it's completely made my day is a little embarrassing to be honest um but from from a approved idea perspective there's a really easy to understand hierarchy system and you can become an approved idea if you spend enough time in the community take a bunch of tests prove that you have the knowledge but you might say that's all well and good Kelsey because you know that's snakes and we're a fandom LED industry and you would totally be right you know changing all of our communities overnight to be purpose-led is a radical overhaul it's probably just not going to happen just because we decided it's the right strategy but I think an easy one to think about are the ways that your communities are already naturally engaging do they like to help onboard new players um are they sharing Resources with each other maybe they're finding people to jump in and game with them you'll notice that the engagement stays the same but if you're making your communities to be

purpose-led it's going to lean less heavily on that identity friction Point suddenly that slope of purpose is happening assume there's not a huge amount of people in the room right now who can actually dictate their company's strategy though um I would like if there's one takeaway that you could take from this to whoever it is it is that you report into um if it's you I'm talking to you right now a short-term gain makes a lot of sense to businesses it's really easy to go we We Know by getting this kpi we're going to get this level of Roi on it great but if we don't start to build our communities with long-term gain in mind it's not going to just have psychological ramifications it's not just going to burn all our community managers up completely but it's going we're going to lose Revenue the toxicity is going to be driving people away people are going to be disengaging

entirely because they just don't want to deal with the level of toxicity it just makes business sense that's it that's me that's me I've got I think a couple of minutes for questions do I I do two minutes hi uh quick question like about the last part you were talking about so in a larger community is the idea then to create multiple like smaller purpose built ones so that it kind of actually breaks up and people have a better yeah yeah I think that's a really interesting idea and I think that that we already see this happening like there's often will be little Corners you know I like to think of it as a party and then little Corners will Splinter off I think that creating the purpose based on that is a really neat idea I think that there's no one-size-fits-all approach though I think it would really depend on the the community itself

thank you thanks hello hi there are there any specific gaming communities that you think have that purpose-led structure and what in particular makes those examples good yeah I think a lot of communities that do it well are the ones that uh have it built into them that they're going to help on board new players because I think that when that happens and a lot of MMOs actually do that quite well is we know that there are toxic corners of this game and we want new people to join so we're going to be friendly we're going to help you get involved we're going to make sure that you have a good good experience um I've seen a couple that have like I've seen like a couple of OverWatch Splinter groups that are formed by a community less less official Community managers and their entire structure is around we're just going to share tips and things like that but yeah the onboarding players tends to be a much less toxic option on the whole gotcha

thank you no worries um real cool question could you uh could you give maybe some examples of what per some what are some purposes a Gaming Community would have like you know with your snake example like learning and being passionate about snakes but you know is it just passion around a particular game but like what's like what would you define as maybe an example of some of that purpose and I guess my reason for asking is you know is that something that we can introduce yeah or is it something that the community kind of organically arrives at because it does feel like a lot of times these Community changes are kind of things that the us as businesses are kind of powerless you know they kind of go in their own Direction anyway absolutely absolutely I think that one of the things that I really want to I.E we're going to make a community based on insert game Title Here is probably not the way we should do it moving forward and so your point of

potentially getting players themselves to form those communities based on the purpose they're creating is is a good idea the idea of having Splinter groups where you're creating under that Banner a bunch of different purpose-led communities makes a lot of sense too but in terms of your question of examples of communities obviously the the onboarding one that I was talking about earlier was was um is a broad example but within your game itself you're going to have purpose there right and I think that leaning on what the mechanics of your game are leaning on what it is you're actually trying to communicate within your game will often give you the answers for that purpose as opposed to just grab a bunch of people who like the game and put them in a room together does that make sense yeah yeah helpful thank you thanks awesome that's me thank you so much [Music] thank you