Virtual Cultures

Quick thoughts: collaborative achievement

So I've recently been thinking a lot about what I've come to call collaborative accomplishment or collaborative achievement (which term works better?). And it's sort of a meta concept for me, really, encompassing neatly a number of powerful experiences and human dynamics that have cropped up in different places, a sort of unified field theory of social dymanics.

My understanding of the workings of online (and other) social dynamics is all rooted, so much as I can, in the basics... Why are people so engaged with games? They're sandboxes, enabling us to experiment, challenge ourselves, and learn to win. What's with the odd twistings of online social identity? Again, it

Why We Need Community Management: A Rant

We don't really have a category for rant, but we should!

Okay here is the existential question that begins my rant: Why do ALL virtual worlds and game companies have technical and customer support during work days between 9am and 5pm or some rough equivalent of that? I really don't know of a single virtual world that has customer service hours AT NIGHT or ON WEEKENDS which is when the use of their service is the highest. It does not take an ethnographer to figure out this simple fact: the majority of MMOG/Wers, with the rare exception of retirees and people with disabilities, play games AT NIGHT and ON WEEKENDS! So this policy which seems to be pervasive is like having a restaurant that has a sign in the window that says: "Dinner Served 9am-5pm." It's the ultimate oxymoron.

Recognizing Game Marriage

Vis a vis my April 28 post on Gay Marriage in MMOGs,I had a thought last night that began as a silly pun, but the more I thought about it the more interesting it became. What if we reversed the formula and instead of asking for recognition of gay marriage in virtual worlds, what if we asked for recognition of game marriage in the real world?