Unconventional Wisdom on Creating a Passionate Community

[Music] all right well it looks like the doors are closed and uh so I'll go ahead and wait for people to get settled for a second and then uh go ahead and start with my presentation here because I'm not at all nervous and totally ready to do this all right um so uh hey there GDC assassins I'm Gabe graziani one quarter of your community team on Assassin's Creed um and I'm here today to talk to you about building a community of exceptionally passionate and creative players um and before I begin I would like to mention that there are going to be some evaluations emailed to you uh during the session so if you could go ahead and be ruthless and brutal in your feedback I would really appreciate it uh now before I begin I need to apologize to you all for the sort of buzzworthy Buzz yeah for the uh Buzz feedy upward the uh headline and

specifically the description uh of this uh of this talk um but I really wanted to get noticed by GDC this year and uh it seemed to work so I figured I would go ahead and put in like 27 uh Community tactics the pr fat cats don't want you to know about um so so yeah it it turns out it worked so here I am um but uh of course at Ubisoft I'm fortunate enough to work with one of the greatest PR teams in the business and I'd be remiss if I I didn't call out the work of stone chin and Chris Norris specifically I couldn't do a lot of the things that I've been able to do at the company uh without their help and support and I owe them uh a lot for participating in the Assassin's Creed Community um and making it one of the most welcoming and Flatout prolific communities uh in gaming today I'm privileged to work with these gentlemen now a little bit about me um I studied film and animation at the Academy of Art University in San

Francisco which is just down the street and at Fisherman's Warf and over on vaness and you you know how these guys are uh it's basically all over the city um and then uh after several years and no degree later I got a job at game pro magazine as a graphic designer um and uh moved into editorial uh as a writer and game critic for Games Radar and later Game Spy and man being a games journalist was like a dream come true like the work was like a dream come true the the pay and the hours not so much so I started I started looking around uh to see if I could do something uh at a at a game studio uh and this was around 2008 so I tried to look for a company who made games that I really liked and because it was 2008 I just finished Prince of Persia if you can find any of my reviews for uh uh Rainbow Six Vegas you'll know that I loved both one and two um so Ubisoft Montreal was a natural fit and the best thing about that too was I had some friends who worked there and you know were able to submit my resume for

me and uh you know they are opening up a new weird Community Development Department that uh I wasn't super familiar with but I had always been active on the forums at all the outlets that I worked at and the part of the reason I mentioned my history is because I wanted to make sure that you guys understand the skill set that I was arriving to the job with right so I had had a bunch of history in film and animation um and then while I was an editorial which involved a lot of uh writing um we also o did uh some podcasts and things like that so I was very like uh AV like multimedia focused so the outline for the GDC presentation says that I need to keep the introduction short um but so much of what I've learned about working in community tracks right alongside my career progress so what I'm going to do is basically continue with my with my career a little bit and give you an Insight on what I learned along the way uh about creating a passionate Community um so when I started uh I didn't have a

a Facebook account I didn't have a Twitter account I didn't understand how any of that stuff worked and what you need to understand is that this was just a weak shy of six years ago so a lot of the brands uh that at the time didn't really weren't Super Active uh on those channels it wasn't a thing that that companies did um so when I arrived uh there really wasn't a very uh obvious plan for how you were supposed to approach this kind of a job um so I looked though to a couple of people who uh I thought were already doing a really good job um and that would be uh Larry herb uh whom some of you may know as Major Nelson at Xbox and then also um Ryan bowling uh who at the time was IM 420 uh Community manager and creative strategist for Call of Duty um so looking at these guys what I noticed first and foremost about them was that they were super present um in their communities they were always available and they were EV virtually everywhere

um especially like when I was a game journalist and I was uh managing the Xbox part of the page for Games Radar Major Nelson's blog was the first place I hit up every morning because that's always where I got all my news um so the key learning there was I needed to be available to my fans so of course at that point I made a Facebook account and Twitter account and started tweeting and Facebooking and doing all that good stuff so when I started on Assassin's Creed Brotherhood um which was the first Assassin's Creed game that I worked on uh we were looking to do a similar kind of thing we were looking to do something to provide presence uh and since we were still struggling with demonstrable uh Roi uh we knew that we had to do it cheap um which is you know I think for Community managers some of you are probably struggling with this yourself um we look for a way to justify the expenditures that we do in order to like have these like good feelings or positive sentiment in the community but there's it's really challenging to

measure those things so when we started we we kind of copped out and we just like well we don't cost anything so you know it's basically free and you get this stuff that maybe is valuable maybe it isn't but hey it's free um so we started doing YouTube q&as and we did those with just like a camera and like two of us uh in the studio um basically we'd ask our community to submit questions via our social channels uh and then we'd respond in a short YouTube video the key thing for these what was that we were constantly refining our approach um and asking for feedback not just on the game but on the actual delivery system how we were communicating with them we wanted to know from our community how we could service them the best so there are a couple of key factors to the success of these that got our community off to a really positive start uh right when it was really starting to grow because at the time that I came on to Assassin Creed Brotherhood we were at roughly I think

160,000 uh Facebook fans today the Assassin's Creed Facebook page uh is a global page with uh I think 10.1 million fans uh on it but uh the key success factors for the YouTube Q&A were that one it was a concrete demonstration of presence uh because we gave them a personality to interact with there was a sense of contact and familiarity uh and this was something that we noticed about YouTube in general at the time um there was a methodology at work for the more popular YouTubers um and one of the things that we noticed they did a lot was interact with their community so uh by answering the questions that we received we were directly interacting with our community and the second um the second thing that uh contributed to the success of those was uh something you might be familiar with called uh Senpai noticed me uh by calling out uh social media identities of fans directly on the YouTube videos uh either their Twitter account names or YouTube handles whatever it was um we were acknowledging individual players in

a very meaningful and public way uh within our growing Community became something of a badge of honor to get your questions answered um especially as the program picked up and we started getting more and more YouTube views on the videos themselves like which at the time it was like I think 30,000 views 30 to 60,000 views we were like oh man this is amazing now it doesn't seem like a whole lot for us but um at the time it was something that we were hit we'd never done anything that like that that consistent l so it was super exciting for us so also at that time uh user generated content was basically taking over um I had done a study uh over the summer uh specifically for ubis software I examined um Bungie's uh Halo Reach beta and at the time they had uh this was before Waypoint so they just had the Bungie blog um and I was going over their blog and noticed that like 80% of the content that they put on the blog was user generated YouTube videos um so

it was clear that and the key learning from that for me too was that they weren't afraid of uh showing videos where people were making fun of them or showing bugs or doing anything like that they just put any content that they found entertaining would go up on the blog um so user generated content became super essential when we got to postlaunch because as many of you are probably aware Assassin's Creed Brotherhood was the first of the series to include multiplayer um and that meant that we needed to give it a lot more post-launch attention um and the multiplayer for Brotherhood was kind of complicated in terms that like it was both different from the main Assassin's Creed game um but it was also different from a lot of multiplayers at the time so people really wanted like there was a feeling in the studio that they wanted us to produce some video content because we just done such great work with these Q&A they're like hey why don't you make some tutorials for the multiplayer uh the problem with that was that I was terrible at it um so like it had been like three weeks

and I had done game capture and written scripts and done all this stuff and I still was I still didn't have a finished video tutorial uh and it was uh it was starting to get super frustrating and right at a time when you know if we didn't deliver something it was going to lose relevance to our players right we were losing players like on a daily basis because they didn't understand what was going on so at this point I want to rewind for a second um because we've been doing a thing that uh had been kind of simmering in the background this entire time um but it was about to become a lot more important um so when I started I took over for a gentleman named Amar aazia uh who was a really talented Community developer um but is now the brand content director for uh the entire Assassin's Creed brand so clearly a multi-talented individual um anyway he'd uh started a feature on our website called our fans Got Talent so like I said an amazing an amazing Visionary uh but maybe not the best at naming things um so so uh our fans Got Talent was a

simple ugc recognition program um where we'd highlight a piece of art from our community every month or so um and then like do like a little interview or something so in focusing on the YouTube Q&A though we'd kind of let that slide and we stopped doing them as frequently as we used to um but uh with YouTube with the YouTube Community becoming uh more productive uh and we started seeing more videos coming out this is about to get super super important so we relaunched the program with a new name called fan appreciation Friday because I love alliteration um so AMR had also pointed out one fan in particular who ID started working with uh more closely and his name was Esco blades uh he was a nice guy and we chatted often on Twitter uh and he was becoming uh more active as a blogger uh and invited our team on to podcasts that he ran so he was starting to run Community podcasts and things like that uh but most importantly he was making gameplay videos of our

multiplayer um and he was really good at it like he had an amazing voice and I don't just mean like his actual physical voice but like his presence on camera he was really nice and really inviting uh and really good at highlighting the different elements of the game so we reached out to him and some of his peers like lumer and squidd uh and we asked if uh it would be all right to highlight their videos on the Facebook page um now I'd felt a little weird about it at the time because I didn't believe in paying people in exposure uh if someone does work for you you pay them for that work right uh so this relationship was problematic for me uh I really didn't want to take advantage of our most dedicated and prolific Community uh members in in that kind of way um it seemed opposite to the kind of philosophy that we were we were going for so I tried to be really honest with them about the way about what we were doing and the way we were going to work together um but among our YouTube Community the response by and large was that I was just being a crazy person person um because that even though we

weren't actually paying them they were getting more views and after a couple of months many of them actually got picked up by different mcms like uh Esco blades got picked up by Machinima and that that's a paying gig for him so by us featuring them on the Facebook page it meant more views for them by us like sending out tweets and like interacting with them it meant more views for them and more views for them was CPM for them um and that meant that they were starting to make more money off of their videos it ALS also was good because it raised their status in their MCN right their multi Channel network um so I could sleep soundly at night with that relationship around the same time we had another art form start appearing more frequently in our fan appreciation Friday features and that was cosplay uh now when I was a game critic uh a video producer a friend of mine and I wanted to produce like a uh this this uh sort of documentary uh about this crazy new thing called cosplay but it was just too weird um over the years though uh that

I've been working in the community it started becoming more and more mainstream um and and the developers loved it uh I think part of the reason for that is that uh there's something super super satisfying for Creative people when they see the thing that they've created cause more creativity in the world like it's sort of like a it's it's a it's a beautiful Synergy right in a virtuous cycle in the truest sense of the word um so they were always super excited to see any costplay that we have and it the demand came predominantly from the dev team but then when we would post these uh images up as fan appreciation Friday images they would tend to get a lot of uh feedback uh and a lot of Engagement um so I started to reach out more to individual cosplayers doing short form interviews with them and stuff for the website um and I was learning a lot about the amount of effort that went into their craft but also how things weren't always emotionally safe for cosplayers on the internet um they were considered by many to be

attention mongers like people who are just in it for attention which is something that I always think is I mean it's a very common threat on the internet to uh like denigrate people for craving attention but the fact of the matter is that it's something that we all uh want right like all people want some degree of attention um so there's from our perspective there's nothing wrong with the pursuit of that um so we tried to keep uh like knowing those things uh about like in talking to cosplayers uh we realized that we needed to keep a very close eye on moderation um whenever we posted a cosplayers photo we always tried to be sure that we were there present in the comment section um and very aware if we needed to uh delete comments or edit comments or something like that um and at that point we had a pretty manageable traffic level um because we were I think something like 480,000 fans on the AC Facebook page at the time and so when we' post a cosplay photo we could basically uh deal with

it so cosplay was becoming bigger we wanted to do a big event um for cosplay to take advantage of the new trend so we decided to do a contest on our Facebook page right after the announcement of Assassin's Creed re Revelations um so we set up a submission mechanic uh with an email address and a list of information for people to provide us with their photos and stuff and we drafted up some legal rules and it was the biggest mistake of my career see we didn't include anything in the legal rules uh that gave us a way to Omit any of the submissions um so that meant that every submission that we got uh had to face the wrath of an extraordinarily critical and ruthless internet um so when we started getting submissions there were some we knew were simply going to be Torn to Pieces but there was nothing that we could do about it because there was no sort of out for us um there was no way that we could uh like kick somebody out of the contest right we had to accept all the Contra entries that's the way the legal rules were written and part of being

accepted in the contest entry meant that your Facebook your your photo went up on the Facebook album um so we did our best uh when the photo album went live but at a certain point you have to stop moderating and go to sleep um so the next morning when I went into work uh we had a couple of Facebook messages um from some really really hurt community members uh and they were chastising us for not disabling the comments for not doing a better job of Protec ing them and things like that um and to this day it's the thing that I regret the most um but it's also the reason that I don't hesitate to remove any comment uh that in any way disparages one of our community members and it's informed how we've approached moderation since um and the sensitivity is inherent to handling user generated content of any kind following that incident we op opted for a zero tolerance policy with respect to the kinds of feedback that we would allow our community to give other community members uh under no

circumstances are you allowed to use a person's race ethnicity gender identity sexual orientation or other inherent trait as an insult on the Assassin's Creed social channels uh and this is a uh this is a policy that's strictly enforced by all of our our social media operatives uh a lot of communities will post these rules somewhere but we just execute on them um although I am sometimes a big fan of going ahead and replying to the comment with the reason that the comment was hidden or deleted uh so it shows up in the person's notification feed um but as I said I've been talking with a lot of cosplayers uh and we had approached some we'd been approached by some internal teams who wanted to work with uh Jessica negri um now I'd had some uh misgivings about working with her because I wasn't sure that she put forth an image uh that was aligned with Assassin's Creed brand values uh she had a tendency to show a lot of skin in her costumes uh and I'll admit that I was personally uncomfortable with promoting

that uh so I put to the co I put it to the cosplayers that I developed relationships with over Facebook Chat asking if they felt it was appropriate appropriate that we work with her um their answer was a resounding and nearly unanimous yes uh because as they explained you cosplay whatever you want however you want um there were some issues in Cosplay at the time uh where there was a discussion going on about oh is this is is this okay to cosplay is that okay to cosplay is this and the Baseline ruling um consensus for the community was you know what we should just not be concerned about it we should if you want to dress up as something then you're going to go ahead and do it and this actually highlights one of the um more positive uh aspects I think of reaching out and being really involved with your community um because of course as I pulled the cost players um their the information that they were giving me helped me be a better feminist in my own personal life and understand

the kinds of things that I could do um to support uh the people in my life that were important to me um and it was most definitely something that the Assassin's Creed brand stood for I mean the assassins in Assassin's Creed are all about uh Freedom uh and Liberty and forging your own path right so it made perfect sense to have her uh as a cosplayer on our pages so we started with working Jessica we started working with Jessica uh and that relationship worked out really well for us um I think at the time that we started working with her uh she had 200,000 Facebook fans and now she's up to well over 2 million um so we got into a habit of posting her photos uh we invited her to the studio um and things were going really well um of course this is the part where I talk a little bit about confronting trolls um because we were very focused on moderating anything that we posted with her in them uh anytime we posted an image of her it drew a lot of comments um and some some of them were were really really unacceptable um but as I

said we didn't have too much trouble with that CU we just remove them um but there was one example um from a com dab we had at the time a super talented guy named parz laa um and he uh brought to my attention um one comment um and somebody had posted this comment on her photo that said I bet you $10 she doesn't even play the games um and that struck us both because we'd literally just watched her destroy an ass ass Creed 4 demo um that a lot of journalists had struggled with um so not to mention it's smacked of that whole fake geek girl garbage that's not real um and it's certainly not welcome in our community so we wanted to crush that sentiment immediately um and Par and we wanted to make sure that we did it publicly so people would understand our stance on it the Assassin's Creed stance on how we felt about people addressing Jessica in this way um so parvez went ahead and responded as the Assassin Creed page with uh let's not make

assumptions Jessica knows the franchise better than you might think we'll take your $10 in the form of a check please send to Ubisoft care of Assassin's Creed um and I'm super proud of that we were able to make that communication because it was a very clear statement of how we felt about um those comments at the time I mean here's the thing uh as a community manager I don't care what draws you to our brand um it just so happened that Jessica was intimately familiar with the games um but even if she just liked the way the outfits look that would be totally fine like I literally do not care what it is that draws you to the brand whichever way you choose to celebrate it is totally fine you do not need to know uh every single thing uh about the Assassin's Creed lore in order to be a fan of it [Music] um that's the only barrier to entry as far as that we're concerned is that you like it and we'll never let someone step over that like it's somehow unworthy or

unwelcome so in conclusion um to summarize the methodologies that I've tried to highlight with my sort of rambling reminiscence of uh the first couple years that I was in Assassin's Creed comptitive uh one be present and responsive uh interact with your community and don't be afraid to have genuine discussions with individuals uh the individuals in it uh you get back more than you put in for sure treat it like a real relationship with a real person because that's what it is it's just with a more people than you're probably used to and a lot more people than a lot of the people that you know are probably used to uh and then two you can viably support creativity by providing with a platform for distribution on the internet exposure can be a valuable commodity if you are honest about the relationship and respect the time and effort that your community puts into user generated content um and as a community manager you're going to be the primary person to do that we spend a lot of time uh working with cosplayers uh and if I had a for every time somebody came to me and

was just like oh hey can we have a cosplayer make a costume for this next week no no you cannot these costumes take a lot of time and effort uh and uh and because we understand that and are intimately familiar with our cosplayers we can work to defend them in that regard uh and three defend vehemently your community's emotional safety to the best of your ability uh don't let weird trolls dominate The Narrative um step in and engage not to win an argument but to demonstrate not to not to win an argument with a particular individual but to demonstrate to your community how you expect them to behave uh amongst each other you want to be the best example of how your community members should treat uh and interact with each other uh so thanks very much for your time uh I will now be absolutely delighted uh to accept uh questions um but I think I need to do that in the Overflow room uh cool and don't forget to uh go ahead and fill out that evaluation thanks very much [Applause]