Tag Archive: Gaming


How Chemicals In Your Brain Make You A Jerk On The Internet

Filed under: Gaming, Philosophy by Malgayne — 16 Comments
August 23, 2010

I’ve recently picked up a copy of Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a book I haven’t yet completed but (so far) highly recommend.  The book itself is about behavioral psychology and neuroscience, but I found it specifically enlightening in regards to the study of community management.

Anyone who does business with people online is familiar with John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Courtesy, of course, of Penny Arcade.

People are jerks on the Internet.  This is not news, and a lot of digital ink has already been spent discussing and rehashing this concept, in ways both humorous and otherwise.  It’s one of the immutable laws of the Internet, and no one who has ever worked with an online community would think to tell you otherwise.  The question that is more important to community managers, of course, is why—and about this I believe Mr. Lehrer may have something to say.

Mr. Lehrer refers to an experiment conducted by a Harvard scientist named Joshua Greene.  In the experiment, which is intended to shed some light on why people make moral decisions the way they do, participants are asked to respond to moral questions while hooked up to a brain scanner.  The first of the questions is as follows:

You are the driver of a runaway trolley.  The brakes have failed.  The trolley is approaching a fork in the track at top speed.  If you do nothing, the train will stay left, where it will run over five maintenance workers who are fixing the track.  All five workers will die.  However, if you steer the train right—this involves flicking a switch and turning the wheel—you will swerve onto a track where there is one maintenance worker.  What do you do?  Are you willing to intervene and change the path of the trolley?

According to Mr. Lehrer, roughly 95% of participants in this study agree that they would throw the switch—that changing the track is the right thing to do.  Some even go so far as to claim a moral imperative—that not changing the track is a moral failure on the part of the trolley driver.  A second thought experiment is then posed:

You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track.  You see a trolley racing out of control, speeding toward five workmen who are fixing the track.  All five men will die unless the trolley can be stopped.  Standing next to you on the footbridge is a very large man.  He is leaning over the railing, watching the trolley hurtle toward the men.  If you sneak up on the man and give him a little push, he will fall over the railing and into the path of the trolley.  Because he is so big, he will stop the trolley from killing the maintenance workers.  Do you push the man off the footbridge?  Or do you allow five men to die?

Lehrer notes that in this scenario, despite the fact that the mathematics of the situation—five lives or one—are identical, almost no one is willing to make the decision to kill the one and save the five.  The experimenter reasons that these represent two different classes of moral decision, calling them “personal” and “impersonal” moral decisions.  In the former scenario, all I really do is flick a switch and turn a wheel.  In the second, I must physically pick up and fling a stranger to a horrible death.  I am physically using my body to do harm to his body.  In the former, there is a layer of abstraction between myself and the horrible act I have been forced to commit.  In the latter, I am forced to look my own actions (and the victim thereof) in the eye.  What was a moral imperative, suddenly becomes murder.

The interesting thing about this is that, as Greene points out, this distinction is not a vague or fuzzy one—it’s actually hard-wired, directly into our brains.  When the subject is presented with the second choice, an entirely different set of neurons lights up.  The decision is made in a different part of the brain.

Before I started working for Wowhead, I worked for the ZAM Network—at the time, a holding company that owned a number of different MMO sites, including Allakhazam, Thottbot, and the MMOUI network of sites.  When Wowhead became part of the ZAM Network, no announcement was made right away—the team wanted to be able to spend some time time discussing how exactly the announcement would be made.

This is the Internet, though, and nothing stays a secret for long.  Within an hour after the paperwork had been finalized, the info was leaked on a tech blog that Wowhead had been purchased.  In response, we wrote a hurried announcement for the front page of the site, talked a little bit about why Wowhead had taken this step, and provided an email address for people to contact.  My first job working on Wowhead was to monitor the emails coming in to this address.

Over the course of the next two weeks, we received hundreds of emails.  Many of them were complimentary, curious, or just had simple questions, but a good number of them were written in outrage—people were furious, angry that Wowhead had “sold out”.  My (self-assumed) responsibility was to read, understand, and respond to every one of these emails.

As I wrote these responses, I noticed something odd—the minute the writer of the angry email received a response, their tone changed completely.  It was as though the writers didn’t realize that these emails did not simply get dumped into a virtual bin somewhere—they were shocked to find that a real, honest-to-goodness human being was reading these responses, and hand-writing individual replies back to each one.  The moment one of these replies was received, the writers would back off immediately and apologize for being harsh.  I didn’t have to say much—just a little “hey, we’re not going anywhere or changing everything, give us a chance”—and people calmed down very quickly.

People are jerks on the Internet.  But I don’t think the reason for this is because the anonymity shields them from consequences—increasingly, people are becoming married to their usernames.  I know that if you google “Malgayne“, you can quickly find anything I’ve ever written.  If I were to post something embarrassing, rude, or ill-advised on this blog, anyone who was offended could spend ten minutes matching my username to my Twitter account and Facebook, which would give them anything they needed to know to find me in the future.  I am not anonymous enough that I can shield myself from dealing with the consequences of what I say.

No, people are jerks on the internet because as far as your brain cells are concerned, no one else on the Internet is a real person.

The Internet is the trolley switch that keeps me from realizing that by taking this action, I will be murdering a human being.  It’s the thin layer of implausibility which interferes with my brain’s ability to make the connection that by being a dick to this guy on a forum, I’m actually bullying him just as much as I would be if I called him an asshole to his face on the street.  It’s the colorful set of pixels that keeps me from realizing that this gnome I’m griefing in World of Warcraft is a real person somewhere—somebody who had a hard day and just wants to relax by farming some leather, and now I’ve taken even that from him by camping his corpse for 45 minutes.

In order to effectively manage an online community, we need to realize that this is not simple “bad behavior” on the part of our users—it’s chemical.  The decisions we make when interacting with people online are governed by an entirely different part of the brain than the decisions we make when interacting with people in person.  Even fine, righteous, morally upstanding people behave differently when they’re dealing with people online, because suddenly interpersonal ethics are being governed by a part of the brain that was built for something else entirely.

If we want to be good community managers, we need to remember two important things:

  1. Every time we feel tempted to be rude, cruel, or judgmental towards someone else, we must forcibly remind ourselves that behind those pixels is a real person, with real feelings and real wishes that need to be addressed, and:
  2. Unless forcibly reminded, no one—no matter how good a person they may be—can be expected to consistently abide by #1.

For those who are interested, Jonah Lehrer maintains his own blog, called The Frontal Cortex, at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex/.

Like This!

Tags: , ,
Comment

The “Mass Effect” Effect: Emergent Storytelling in Games

Filed under: Gaming, Personal by Malgayne — 3 Comments
July 19, 2010

The Apple fiasco of the past few weeks has been the subject of much discussion, and I have some thoughts I’d like to publish on Apple’s response (which was a fair to middling handling of the crisis, though it still doesn’t entirely make up for their abysmal handling of the issue up until that point).  But I realize that this is intended to be a gaming blog, and I may have gotten a bit off message.

So instead, I want to talk a little bit about the game(s) that have had me so excited these past few weeks: The Mass Effect series.

Warning: Some Mass Effect spoilers may follow.  I think I do a fair job of keeping them to a minimum, but if you’re strict about spoiling yourself for games like this, think twice before continuing.

There’s been enough press about the Mass Effect series already that I don’t need to tell you why it’s an awesome game.  The gameplay is solid, the story is compelling, and the world they’ve created is very intricately crafted.  BioWare is rapidly becoming one of my favorite game developers (Dragon Age was another one of my favorites), and while the first game had a few threadbare patches, the second (so far) has resolved all those issues admirably.

What I want to talk about, though, is a particular experience I had playing the game.  One of the core mechanics of the Mass Effect series is the “Paragon” vs. “Renegade” dichotomy.  Basically, as the game progresses, you are offered the opportunity to make decisions which set you up as a “Paragon”, or a hero—a noble, honorable man out to do right not just by himself, or even by his own species, but by his entire galactic community.  The alternative is the “Renegade” path—a Han Solo-esque anti-hero, who’s looking out for number one, and who wants to get in, get the job done, and get out—no matter the cost.  I think both of these paths offer compelling stories and ways of progressing through the game, but I am a natural people-pleaser, so most of my choices fell naturally in line with the “Paragon” path.

The result of this is that in the climactic finale of the first game, I made a choice that sent a huge number of human soldiers to their deaths, precisely because I viewed the lives of aliens to be of equal value to the lives of humans.  As a result, at terrible cost to the human species, the Council—a governing board which up until this point had pointedly not included a human representative—would survive.  This was a difficult choice, because the Council had not exhibited any particular faith in me or my cause, but I ultimately decided that the upheaval and civil war that would follow the attempted creation of a new, human-oriented governing body would cause more terror and bloodshed than the sacrifices we made.

Mass Effect 2 showed a darker side to my accomplishment.  Early in the game, my character goes missing and is presumed dead.  The Council—they very one I saved from destruction—takes advantage of this eventuality to discredit my concern over the true danger (which still lurks out there) as the ravings of a madman.  I have been abandoned by the Alliance Military to serve the Council, and now the Council has abandoned me as well.  No one understands the true danger facing the galaxy except for me.

And apparently a creepy, paramilitary/terrorist organization known as Cerberus, which has (through a feat of medical science) rescued me from death, and provided me with a new ship and a new crew.

This puts my “Paragon” character in an awkward position. In any other situation, he would turn away Cerberus’ help in a second.  He hates what they stand for and wants to push himself as far away from their goals as possible…except that they’re the only organization in the galaxy that believes in his mission, and has the clout to do anything about it.  My new squad offers a similar conundrum.  The most affable among them are Cerberus operatives sent to spy on me, and the least affable are a genetically engineered super-soldier and a paranoid sociopath.  Even my old comrades have changed—they’re more ruthless, less concerned with the welfare of the people around them—and slowly but surely, my character is starting to become harder, darker, and more grim.

Here’s where it gets interesting.  The game does not force me into this situation.  Players who choose the “Renegade” path have the option of approaching this new team as a refreshing change from the restrictive, bureaucratic influence of the Council and the Alliance Military.  It was my choice to feel alone and disenfranchised from my new teammates, and there were no cinematic sequences or plot points that relied on it.  So when I run into an old military buddy—an old crewmate who I had painted up in my head as a close friend of my character, even though there was no actual requirement in the first game that this should be so—he called me out.  He was angry with me, shouting that I had betrayed everything they stood for, and as I stood there talking with him, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe he was right.

After this I got very depressed.  I began to realize that my (character’s) mission was costing me my (character’s) identity.  And that maybe I would succeed—in fact, I would have to succeed—but I began to understand that when I came out on the other side of this experience, I would not be the same person.  This saddened me.  I liked the “me” I had created, and I didn’t want to see it go.  I missed the feeling that I was working together with a team of people who respected me, and who I respected.  I missed the days when good and evil were clear choices.

Then, two things happened.

Firstly, I went on a quest that came as part of a DLC pack, where the Alliance asked me to visit the crash site of my original ship.  I wandered the wreckage, looking back on all the memories of those days, wallowing in my depression.  I collected the dog tags of all my fallen friends, to make sure they got the honors they deserved.  And I found a journal, written by my former first officer, talking about the effect that my shining example had had on him—and how when he finally did die in battle, he died proudly knowing he was giving his life for the good of his team, just like I would have done.  When the camera gave me a brief cinematic glimpse of my former first officer’s face, frozen eternally in a salute, I nearly cried at how far I had fallen.

Then, I went on a side quest with one of my teammates—a grizzled mercenary captain named Zaeed Massani (who, by the way, is played by Robin Sachs in what may be my favorite piece of video game voice acting of all time).  My brother, who is further along in the game than I, has already informed me that the only way to earn Zaeed’s loyalty in this mission is to be a truly awful person.  The quest did not disappoint—our stated goal was to liberate a fuel refinery from occupation by a mercenary army, but it quickly becomes clear that Zaeed has a personal vendetta against the merc captain—when he sets the refinery on fire in the hopes of smoking out his rival.  I am furious with him, and I order him to abandon his personal quest to bring down the merc captain and come with me to help evacuate the survivors from the refinery.  I know that by doing so, I am losing Zaeed’s loyalty permanently, and that has real in-game consequences—I’ll never be able to unlock his final, most powerful ability.  But also, I can feel my character making a stand—digging in his heels, refusing to become the uncaring, unfeeling mercenary that Cerberus seems to want him to be.  I don’t care if I have to give up Zaeed’s loyalty—or even a powerful in-game reward—I won’t do it at the cost of my soul.

At the end of the quest, the merc captain escapes.  Zaeed is raging furiously at the captain’s ship as it flies away, firing his rifle uselessly into the air.  And in the final conversation, where Zaeed is furious at me for allowing his bounty to escape, I realize something my brother didn’t know.  I have been following the “Paragon” path more closely than he, and as a result I have access to a dialogue option he didn’t have access to.  I tell Zaeed that it doesn’t matter to me what he did before—he’s now part of my team.  And being on a team means trusting one another—no matter what.  He glares at me, but finally relents—acknowledging that maybe, just maybe…my way is better.

I walk out of that mission with his loyalty earned, his final power unlocked, and my faith in my character’s own morality restored.  I walk out thinking, maybe it’s impossible to finish this mission without giving up everything that’s worth fighting for—but I’m damn well going to try.

This is emergent storytelling. Some of the aspects of that story are contained within the game’s writing itself, but a lot of it had to come from me.  The existential crisis was my own.  My depression and disenfranchisement were my own.  And as a result, my character went through a trial by fire and found a new resolve—a trial, and a resolve, that had never been written into the game’s script.

So what’s the best example of emergent storytelling you’ve ever encountered?  Has a game ever told you a story that it’s creators never imagined?

Tags: , , ,
Comment

The Hero RTS and the Power of Choice

Filed under: Gaming by mourndrake — Leave a comment
June 25, 2010

"I think the formula is, 'RTS + RPG = Super-awesome.'"

So I’m pretty sure the way it all worked out was like this: Waaaaaaaay back before July 2002 (A dark time, before the release of World of Warcraft, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Lord of the Rings Online, or indeed any good MMORPG other than Everquest), a Blizzard Entertainment development team sat down to brainstorm ideas for their next installment in the Warcraft series (then known for being a respected RTS series, and not the setting for an online game with an addictiveness level somewhere between heroin and power) over coffee and donuts. ”Hey, I have an idea!” said one of the devs. “Let’s include powerful Hero units in each army to add flavor and cater to different styles of play. These units will gain experience and level up, just like in an RPG, but the abilities they gain will impact how the army functions and generally make them badass.” The over-caffeinated dev-team quickly agreed to this conceptual gem and though the implementation would take many months, hundreds of thousands of processor-hours and a forest’s worth of paper converted into yellow sticky notes, the game that would eventually be released to much fanfare was arguably one of the finest and most novel executions of the C&C style RTS ever made, largely due to Hero feature. Not only did the presence of heroes provide a single avatar onto which players could (and invariably did) project, but the ability to skew an army toward a chosen play style was a welcome one, and almost unheard of in the RTS world prior.

Fast forward to sometime before mid April 2009, a development team at Gas Powered Games—after perhaps one too many playthroughs a Warcraft III multiplayer mod called “Defense of the Ancients“—struck on a peculiar notion: What if there was a game much like Warcraft III where the player controlled just his Hero, rather than the entire army? What then if the player and his hero were set loose in a map with other players and their heroes where computer controlled foot soldiers of varying strengths clashed in a roughly equal contest of arms, leaving the ultimate course of the battle to the ingenuity, acumen and strength of the players and their avatars?

Perhaps you think, as initially I did, that this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea. Playing a gimped-RTS (or a gimped-RPG, depending on how you look at it) does not on the surface sound like something you’d really want to spend a lot of time on. I mean, the basic premise here is “Here is an RTS with almost none of the functionality”, or alternately “Here is an RPG with all of the leveling up, none of the story and an extremely confined world”. Essentially, it sounds like half a game—which is not only something I don’t really want to play, but also something I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play.

To their credit, however, the folks at GPG ran with it and in April 2009 released Demigod. This was followed soon after by Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends, games based on an identical premise (and indeed on identical inspiration). Thus was born the Hero RTS (or if you like, Action RPG)—a unique style of game that is easy to learn, hard to master and ridiculously fun. The amount of fun to be had from these games was so out of proportion to what I would have expected that it got me to wondering why. And I think it came down to this: player choice, and the impact it has on the game.

Anyone who’s been a gamer in the last twenty years or so is probably aware of the general trend toward giving the player greater freedom of action in game, and can probably make some reasonable guesses as to why: it’s fun. Rather, it’s fun if it’s done right. Any game carries with it limitations inherent to the structure, be it chess, Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft. People accept that. What people are increasingly unwilling to accept are games in which a player is offered choices that have no impact on the game, a sin that video games (particularly RPG’s of various stripes) are frequently guilty of. That’s bad game design, and more to the point, it’s not fun.

Now I will pause here to admit that freedom of choice combined with those choices having meaningful consequences is just technologically hard, even within the confines of a game. After all, someone has to code for all of those choices (and let’s face it, even in very structured games, like chess, the sheer number of options available to the player can get very large very quickly), and their outcomes as well as the affect those outcomes have on future choices ad infinitum. All of this takes up time and development budget as well as media storage space and memory to execute on the machine that will end up actually running the game. And that’s not even mentioning that players can make choices that can break the game. For example if you choose in a game to give your players freedom of movement around the game world, then in order to make that freedom seem meaningful you’re going to have to code some variety in the ways the player can experience the game’s story—because if you don’t, then the player will feel even more railroaded on a set path for having a choice that doesn’t mean anything than he would if he didn’t have freedom of movement to begin with.

In short, it’s no surprise to me that despite the general trend in games toward an “actions have meaningful consequences” paradigm, and despite the number of games that claim to offer freedom of action, multiple endings, etcetera, the number of choices with meaningful outcomes players can make in any given game is often quite small. And that’s why I like these Hero RTS games. Within the framework of the game, every choice the player makes has a direct impact on the way the game unfolds. Deciding what order to unlock your abilities? That drastically alters the way you play and the way others play against you, and has continuing consequences in that some of your abilities will just be stronger because you’ve put more effort into developing them. Defending a particular area of the field? I hope you’re good at what you do, because you’re going to be sorely missed elsewhere. Do you want to mow down the enemy grunts to isolate their heroes or take on their champions first to minimize the damage they’re doing to your army? And the list goes on. The impact a single player can have on the game is enormous and the impact multiple players working on concert can have is staggering. For example, I recently played a game of League of Legends where, in a 5v5 match, my team lost two players (disconnected) early on—and still won with a combination of psychological warfare, canny tactics and plain old chutzpah. At the end of the match I felt more pride and elation in that victory than I had in finishing entire other games. Why? Because I contributed directly to the outcome. It’s entirely fair to say that my team would have lost without me (and in all fairness my other two teammates can make similar claims). That is freedom of choice.

That is fun.

Tags: , ,
Comment

How Interactive Are Videogames?

Filed under: Gaming, Philosophy by nabterayl — 15 Comments
May 25, 2010

Reality? Heresy?

Natalie here (turns out “Natalie” is already taken as a wordpress username … who knew?).

Let me start this post with an acknowledgment, followed by a confession.  The acknowledgment: I am bound by secret gamer law to hate Roger Ebert and all his works.  This is, of course, because Ebert once said (and to my knowledge continues to believe) that videogames can never be art—a statement that all gamers are honor-bound to abhor on principle.  In making this statement, Roger Ebert has made himself an enemy of the gamer state, and all true gamers are bound to deride him at every opportunity.

The confession: I admire Roger Ebert enormously, both as a writer and as a thinker.  And while I disagree with him that videogames, by nature, can never be art, I do think that he raises an interesting point.

Here and here, Ebert articulates why he thinks that videogames can never be art.  I’ll extract the two most interesting passages:

Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision.

Here’s the question I think these two passages raise: Are videogames artistically interactive?

Let us assume (as we are bound to do by gamer law) that videogames are, or at least contain, art.  Is that art interactive?  Do my “player choices” contribute to or change the art in a videogame?  Assuming (as we are) that nature is “improved or altered” through the passage of the soul of the artist of a videogame, am I part of that “artist?”  Is nature passing through my soul to be improved or altered?  When I play a game, am I in any meaningful sense the “artist” of that game?

Non-Interactive ArtLet me draw from two non-videogame examples that are not artistically interactive to better illustrate what I mean.  Suppose both you and I are observing a painting that is a piece of art (say the Mona Lisa, if you need a specific example).  You and I will be having different experiences—the way I react to the painting is different from the way you react to the painting.  In other words, the identity of the consumer changes the overall artistic experience, and in that sense, we might call viewing a painting an “interactive” experience.  But when I ask whether videogames are “artistically interactive,” I am referring to something more interactive than this.

Now suppose you and I are at an old penny arcade and we come across one of those coin-operated peep show machines where we can turn a crank to animate a little flip book animation.  Let’s further suppose that the animation in this particular machine is undeniably a work of art.  In order to view the entire work, you and I must put a penny in the slot and turn the crank.  In short, we must interact with the machine.  But that is all we are interacting with—the art itself (the animation) is essentially unchanged by our interaction, although it is our interaction that allows us to reveal or uncover the art that is hiding within the depths of the storage medium.  When I ask whether videogames are “artistically interactive,” I am asking not whether our interaction is necessary to uncover, unlock, or experience the art, but whether we interact with the art itself.

My suspicion, and I welcome disagreement on this point in the comments, is that videogames are not artistically interactive.  In fact, I submit that they are nothing more than really complicated peep show machines, whose cranks have become keyboards, mouses, and gamepads, and whose art can be viewed in more combinations than simply turning the crank forwards or backwards.

In short, I submit that while we interact with the game, the art is not meaningfully subject to player choice, and that however many souls there may be through which nature passes to be improved or altered by a videogame,  the soul of the end-user gamer is not one of them.  In a follow-up post I’ll offer some thoughts on why this might be significant, but in the meantime, let me pause here, and submit my heresy to the judgment of the gamer state.

Tags: , , , ,
Comment

Community Management and the New PR

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Philosophy by Malgayne — 19 Comments
May 5, 2010

GamePro posted an article yesterday which I consider required reading for anyone who doesn’t feel like they really understand what a “community manager” does. The article can be found here:

http://www.gamepro.com/article/news/215050/analysis-communication-confusion-and-community-managers-update/

The inspiration for this was something that happened to Dan Amrich, a friend of mine who recently became the Social Media Manager at Activision. This is a new position, and watching him as he defines the boundaries of his new role has been a learning experience for me—as I imagine it probably has been for him.

There was a big fuss recently on Develop and Joystiq about some conjecture Dan posted on Facebook regarding the Activision / Infinity Ward lawsuit. Basically he offered some commentary on the lawsuit which was his own personal conjecture, which the news sites interpreted as official statements. Dan quickly posted a clarification on his blog, but I can nonetheless easily imagine the Activision chewing out that I personally conjecture must have occurred—I’ve been on the receiving end of a chewout or two like that myself.

Employing someone like Dan is a very scary decision for most businesses. The purpose of hiring a community representative is to connect directly with your customers, and that means really answering their questions—and not just the easy ones. You need to be genuinely open to customer feedback. Transparency is scary—the closed culture is a tradition that goes all the way back to the beginning of corporate America. There are some things that you don’t talk about. Anything you say can and will be used against you, after all—and the Internet is a wild, vindictive place.

When community management is good, it’s really really good. Seth Killian at Capcom calls it a “superhealthy feedback loop”—the players tell the devs what they’re passionate about, and the devs tell the gamers what they’re passionate about, and everyone is richer for the experience.

But when it’s bad, it’s horrid. The true danger of snafus like this lies in the fact that when the proverbial shit hits the fan, the reaction of the company is frequently one of panic. The first thing a company often does is to tie the community manager’s hands—to lock them down and prevent them from saying anything, for fear of making the situation worse. This is a mistake, just as much as the passengers trying to take the controls away from the pilot when the flight gets turbulent. Crisis situations are a good time to make your expectations of your community team very clear, but the worst thing you can do is lock down your community manager when that happens. Community managers are your first line of defense from PR crises, and heavily restricting their ability to do their job at those critical times is only going to hurt you in the long run.

The fact is, the industry needs community managers. I belong to a generation of gamers that expects to be personally engaged. We’re interested in the companies we patronize, and if we can’t get our information from the source we’ll speculate—and that speculation is often dangerous, both to the company and to the community.

The game industry, perhaps more than any other, is dependent on direct and personal online communication with the customer—and community managers are the people making that connection. We’re still in the early stages of evolution for the community management business, but as time goes on—and as the role of the community manager becomes more clearly defined—more and more companies will be realizing the benefits of a policy of transparency and open communication with their customers. And I, for one, am looking forward to every minute.

Tags: , , ,
Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.