Session 7 - Management and Conflict

MMORPG Forums

My final project takes a look at the massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Rift. In this post I will take a look at the website Trion Worlds--the developer of the game--has created. Standards set by developer-run websites for older MMORPGs like Everquest and World of Warcraft have largely determined that other developer-run websites for new games will offer users moderated forums. These forums are typically moderated by developers and others working within the company.


The forums give developers the opportunity to interact with the community in order to create a better end-product. For example, if a large number of players complain that their dwarven necromancer is weaker than the other magic-using characters, then the developers might take a look at the game to see why this is the case. In my experience playing other MMORPGs persistent, logically stated complaints and observations posted in the forums at least get the developers to look at what is bothering the community. If a problem is found, there is a period of testing that occurs on test servers (usually with volunteers from the player community), and changes are implemented to fix it through a patch. 


Community interaction is important to developers that care about maintaining the profitability of their MMORPG. A particular hotbed of interaction often occurs in the forums dedicated to guilds within the game, where I will find examples of rule breaking. 

Rift - Rules

Code of Conduct Violations

Applicable to in-game and forum-based interactions, these violations can and will get your account suspended or deleted. 

Standard Violations

https://trionworlds.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/118

Severe Violations

https://trionworlds.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/118

General Rule Sets

https://trionworlds.custhelp.com/

http://www.riftgame.com/en/game/faq.php

Find three examples on the site where one or more rules have been broken, specifically in the form of interpersonal conflict (i.e. not just spam posts). Give a brief synopsis of each situation, along with any admin or user reactions if available, and provide a screenshot.

Rule Violations

1. Racist, Sexist, Religious, Hate speech 
The link above will take you to a (rather long) thread where a user complains about in-game chat that violates the codes of conduct. As the thread progresses other forum users eventually steer the topic toward religious/political arguments that start to get heated. The moderator of the bulletin board eventually closes the topic.

First post.

Thread starts going off-topic.

Forum mod responds to user query and closes thread. Click to read.

Admin Reaction 

As an admin, I would do the same thing that actually happened in the example above. I would address the complaint by restating the terms of service and then closing the thread.

I do not want to encourage "low-quality contributions" by "spammers and trolls" because, as mentioned by the Cosley article, editorial oversight of these threads will hopefully lead to less antisocial behavior. (Cosley, 2005) Therefore I would choose to close the thread down after quickly addressing the original complaint.

The complaining user appears to want more interaction with moderators and GMs, so much so that it reminded me of the "self important" example of roguish behavior in the Understanding Roguish Behavior article. (Gazan, 2007) I would not directly respond to the complaining user because that would probably encourage him/her to continue ignoring the "Ignore" feature provided by developers for such cases.

There exists an "Ignore" button in the game so that users can censor speech by other users they find offensive. Ignoring another user only blocks them from your own chat window, other users can still see what they type. The user that started this thread does not find that adequate and complains that they want specialized attention. Although the complaint may have some merit, the user still wants special consideration for their problem. I would direct them back to the terms of service and restate what options there are for them to have their concerns dealt with.

2. Botting


The link above explains what botting is. In this thread, users celebrate the banning of a player caught botting.

Users celebrate the banning of an account accused of "botting". 

Admin Reaction

The admin reaction in this case was appropriate. As an admin, I would not just suspend the account, I would delete the offending character from the server so that particular user will have to go through the hassle of creating a new one. The "banhammer" would fall hard upon the heads of users I caught cheating in my game. 

Why do people react so angrily to botters?

I assume it is because people that use bots are unfairly obtaining in-game items and levels by circumventing the need to work for their character. This could make users that work their way up "legitimately" feel like their character is being devalued by the botters. 


Madison wrote that, "Customs, traditions, patterns, and practices of reproduction, modification, and use develop and intersect via connections to things." (Madison, 2006)  For a virtual item like a character in an online game to make a connection to a user, the customs, traditions, etc. of the community need to be enforced. Therefore, to protect users that don't cheat, I would ban the botters. 




3. Phishing

The above link describes what a phishing violation is. 

Phishing thread

The above link links to a thread describing a phishing complaint. In this thread the original complaint is met with constructive commentary such as "Don't click on the link" and "Please don't include clickable links when asking these kinds of questions". 

 

Phishing Complaint

The reaction by the developers of RIFT has been to develop an authenticator program that is usable through a smartphone:

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?161478-Rift-Mobile-Authenticator-Now-Available-for-iPhone-and-iOS-3.0-!&highlight=phishing

Another response is the "coin lock" that asks you to use a code sent to your Email when you log in to the game from say, a different country: 

https://trionworlds.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/930/kw/coin%20lock

Admin Reaction

I would follow the example set by previous admins and developers and create something similar to the "coin lock". The coin lock function I would impose partially reflects upon what Madison wrote about "breaking down or 'modularizing' cognitive tasks," and "mitigating the consequences of a failure...so that the failure is not catastrophic." (Madison, 2007) 

Coin locking keeps your character from being modified, erased, or otherwise harmed. The Wired article by Dibbel (Fantastic read if you really want to see the motivation behind 'griefing' in online games), explains that anti-social users are out there to, "destroy whatever virtual thing they've sunk the most real time, real money, and, above all, real emotion into...and get them to quit the game." 

By entering your code, the developers are tasking you with a second layer of authentication to keep your account safe and prevent this from happening. 

There are users that simply won't know what to do in cases of phishing--possibly due to a lack of experience with phishers, or just an insecure system compromising their account information. Implementing the coin-lock system, which employs iconic imagery to what is essentially just a code sent via email, reinforces the idea that a user account is protected. 

Finally, in response to a thread where the initial question post includes a link to a phishing site, I would impose a "cooling off" period for the original poster and disallow them from posting any links or any follow-up posts. Until they read a short blurb describing why they are not allowed to post phishing site links (determined by forum moderators), they will not be able to post. 

5 "Unwritten" Rules

1. Let users vote in-game to punish users that have been recorded violating the Terms of Service.

2. Learn the vocabulary and customs of the online world you are joining to facilitate communication and cement your identity in that world. (Doneth, 2007)

3. No "clickable" links to phishing sites in forum posts, even if topic is asking about said sites.

4. Don't bother admins until you have exhausted the procedures listed in the Terms of Service.

5. Users can "vote with their feet" by not playing character builds that are significantly weaker than other builds due to overzealous nerfing. 

Sources

Madison, Michael J. (2006).  Social Software, Groups, and Governance. Michigan State Law Review, Vol. 2006, p. 153. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=786404 

Cosley, Dan, Dan Frankowski, Sara Kiesler, Loren Terveen, John Riedl (2005). How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities. CHI 2005, April 2-7 2005, Portland, Oregon.

Kollock, Peter and Marc Smith (1994). Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities.  In: Susan Herring (ed.), Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 109-128. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/virtcomm/Virtcomm.htm

Grimes, Justin, Paul Jaeger and Kenneth Fleischmann (2008).  Obfuscatocracy: A stakeholder analysis of governing documents for virtual worlds. First Monday 13(9).http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2153/2029

Gazan, Rich (2009).  When Online Communities Become Self-Aware. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Gazan, Rich (2007).  Understanding the Rogue User. In: Diane Nahl and Dania Bilal, eds.  Information & Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today, 177-185.

Dibbell, Julian (2008). Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World.  Wired 16.02.http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-02/mf_goons?currentPage=all

Reed, Mike (no date). Flame Warriors. http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm

Session 6 - Online Furdentity and InFurraction

Online Identity:

Creating an online identity involves direct contribution to online spaces, be it through social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Blogger, or even a personal website. Active online identities are created through sustained, involved interaction with other users via the medium of the internet. Through the internet, people are now able to participate and nurture--in a more open environment--communities that would otherwise be kept a secret. 

Wellman et. al.’s sense of networked individualism is actually a good hypothesis on how social interaction has changed due to increased internet connectivity. For this post I decided to investigate a site related to a subculture that (http://www.pa-furry.org//) involves a user community largely convinced they are human-shaped animals trapped in human bodies, commonly known as “Furries”. Thanks to the internet, I believe people like these furries are able to use the internet to "supplement" their communities. They can organize conventions, meetings at coffee shops, and find ways to promote their strange culture on websites like pa-furry.org and LiveJournal. 

Furries:
Ruining your next trip to Disneyland.

The furry world is a dark dark place where most people wouldn't dare tread, at least not without a can of pepper spray or some other form of protection. These people are normally ostracized for their deviant ways, therefore, much like the "goths" in the study in the Hodkinson article, the furries on http://www.pa-furry.org/ create individual spaces that link up and reinforce their subculture. Because of the (entirely appropriate) social stigma surrounding furries, their identities were usually kept as a secret in their offline lives. However, also like the goths studied by Hodkinson, OCs have given furries a way to do offline meetups in environments they feel comfortable in, like whitewater rafting.

Yes. People dressed up in animal suits kayaking is actually happening.

Just like any other social network, the furries crafted their online profile to present a certain "persona"; kind of along the lines of what was mentioned in the Liu article. They create their profiles to both be as unique as possible, some giving their "animal character" elaborate back-stories and behavioral qualities they might not possess/wish to posses in real life.

Three Scenarios:

Furnario 1 (Sun) -

Teddy Everyman has always enjoyed dragons. Lately, he's been feeling like he IS a dragon... trapped in the body of a man. He desires a social group that understands his feelings to provide him with moral support. So, he decides to start a profile on a popular furry website in his area in order to connect with like-minded people. 

• Teddy goes to furry website and finds the account creation page
• The account creation process is simple and quick, so he is able to devote time to developing his profile
• After his profile is created, he uses the search box on a sidebar in the site to find "dragons" to see if there are users that can give him any advice
• He successfully finds the profile of one "Rygon the red dragon" and initiates a friend request

Yes it's real. No, you can't unsee it.

• Rygon accepts his friend request and they start a dialogue 

• Teddy is able to find support from another "dragon" and becomes an active member on the website, helping other dragon "hatchlings" with their freaky problems

Furnario 2 (Sun) -  

Annie Allweek wants to organize a photo shoot with all her friends dressed up in their animal suits. She decides to use the polling feature of the furry enthusiast site she is a member of. 

• Annie creates a poll

• She asks the administrator of the website for front-page space to promote her event
• Her request is granted and the poll runs for two weeks
• Through the poll, she learns that 20 out of 35 members are willing to participate in a "fursuit photo shoot"
• Annie successfully conducts her photo shoot after arranging a time and place with the willing participants

Furnario 3 (Rain) -

A. Bonny and I. Vory were living together in perfect harmony. They decided to sell their piano keyboard because they needed money for a new donkey suit concept they were designing. After seeking advice from members of their online furry community, they were directed to Craigslist as the best place to sell something.

• A. Bonny and I. Vory create an account with Craigslist 
• They create an ad describing the sale of their precious piano keyboard
• They post their address and include a picture of the front of their house so interested parties can come and inspect the piano
• A day later they get a phone call from an "interested party" that wants to know when A. and I. will be home so they can come see the piano
• A. and I. let the buyer know that they aren't home during the morning, but are usually available after 5pm everyday
• The potential buyer thanks them and says he will come in three days
• The next day in the afternoon, A. Bonny and I. Vory come home to see that their house was robbed
• The police arrive, hear their story, and suspect that the potential buyer was just casing the joint
• A. Bonny and I. Vory are depressed and seek solace from the furry website
• The only reply they get is a link to this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
• (; _ ;)

How people in animal costumes express their online identity...

...with animal drawings for their avatars. Yes, I'm serious. The members of Pennsylvania Furries either draw their own, or have more artistically talented members draw their avatars. Avatars are typically created to represent the type of animal members most identify with. This ties in directly to a point made in the Ploderer article, "like on a stage in a theatre, people appropriate the social network site to promote accomplishments."

Members of the Pennsylvania furry site take great pride in sewing their suits and showing off their artwork. Although I personally find their handiworks too far outside the norm for for me to ever be interested in their world, I can certainly appreciate the craft they display in sewing life-sized animal suits. 

Some kids were a little TOO impressed with the animatronics at Chuck E Cheese...

Identities are maintained through sustained interaction with the community. There are meet-ups, group fundraisers, online events, forum posts, photo caption contests, and other things one would typically find on less niche social networks. The site also uses social tagging (http://www.pa-furry.org/tags) to help users navigate topics of interest to them, with more popular topics having a larger font than the others. 

Cementing an identity in the furry community also involves learning special vocabulary and using special clothing. The article by Doneth said it best: 

...information fashions can create virtual walls, allowing those in the know to recognize others within their subculture via their common understanding of jokes and references that have not yet spread to the mainstream. (Doneth, 2007)

Furries, like any other community (but a lot hairier), have the in-jokes and references that Doneth writes about. For a community to feel unique, to feel special, these kinds of things are important. 

In summary:

I looked at the furry community because I saw in it a slight parallel with games like World of Warcraft, where a user selects an avatar to represent themselves in the virtual space with. I noticed that people can in fact develop an emotional connection to a character that they see themselves as--be it an Elf in a game or a bear suit--but this is something I'll discuss in another post. I'm no closer to understanding the world of furries than I was before examining their website, but I now have a clearer picture of how interactions on social networks function, and how there are certain norms that establishing an online identity will tend to follow. 

Furrocious sources:

Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill and Lynn Cherny (1998). The Dynamics of Mass Interaction. Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW98), Seattle, Washington, 257-264.

Wellman, Barry, Anabel Quan-Haase, Jeffrey Boase, Wenhong Chen, Keith Hampton, Isabel Isla de Diaz and Kakuko Miyata (2003).  The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 8(3). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Donath, Judith. (2007). Signals in Social Supernets. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1).  http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donath.html

Liu, H. (2007). Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 13. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/liu.html

Ploderer, B., S. Howard & P. Thomas (2008). Being Online, Living Offline: The Influence of Social Ties Over the Appropriation of Social Network Sites. Proceedings of CSCW 2008.
http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/student/rhd/berndp/research/CSCW2008Ploderer.pdf

Hodkinson, Paul (2006).  Subcultural Blogging? Online Journals and Group Involvement Among UK Goths.  In: A. Bruns and J. Jacobs, Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang, 187-199.
http://www.paulhodkinson.co.uk/publications/hodkinsonsubculturalblogging.pdf

Huberman, Bernardo, Daniel Romero and Fang Wu (2009).  Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under the Microscope" First Monday 14(1).
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2317/2063

Session 5: Social knowledge production and services - Getting news from Japan

(Apologies for the lateness of this post. I've been frantically trying to get in touch with people I know in Japan and have not been able to focus. This will not happen again.) 

News 2.0 
By now, we have all heard about the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated the northeastern side of Japan last Thursday. Though the tsunami warning for Hawaii had me on edge last week, I was far more worried about friends and former colleagues and their safety, since the epicenter was very near the city I once called home.

While having dinner with a few friends, an ominous silence suddenly overtook the restaurant. All eyes were glued to the grim news on the televisions around the room: One of the largest earthquakes in the history of Japan had just occurred. Deciding that it would be too dangerous to stay out that night and beside myself with worry over the state of my friends in Japan, I quickly excused myself. CNN provided the most coverage, but much of the information was second-hand from NHK and prone to a lot of errors. Thanks to friends in Osaka that were online at the time, I was able to get a link to a live stream of NHK reports via Ustream. Many other friends either Tweeted links to Ustream or posted it in their Facebook statuses. 

Ustream is interesting because you can see streaming traditional television news stations contrasted with live updates provided by users logged into the "Social Stream" on the right-hand side of the viewer window. 

NHK Feed via Ustream
with commentary on the right

Ustream allows users to stream their own content across the internet. These users range from a person broadcasting their baby's first birthday, to major news organizations like NHK and CNN. On the side of video feeds available on Ustream, one is able to log in to a running commentary sidebar that functions much like a regular chat room or a Twitter feed. Users may log in through a variety of social networks and can interact with other users watching the Ustream feed. 

Much like Amazon or Netflix, Ustream
appears to use collaborative filtering to suggest feeds

Ustream features a page devoted to news that not only streams the most popular news feed at the moment, but it suggests feeds also being viewed by a large number of viewers. As you can see from the screenshot above, the most popular feeds are (understandably) those with news about the situation in Japan. The article by Lerman, with its mention of "collaborative filtering," came to mind when I saw this page. Many different friends were slowly relaying the link to Ustream over their Twitter and Facebook accounts, filling up my news feeds. I too reposted the link which other friends also reposted from my Facebook wall to their own. 

Unsourced reports from viewers
contrasts with live reports in the window to the left

It was strange at times to see the news feed playing as people were making comments. Sometimes users would post information that was contradictory to what was being said on NHK, and this would set off a wave of speculation that rippled through the conversation for a while. Unscientific observations of the feeds at the time showed that while trollish behavior was still present, a surprising majority of those interacting with others on the social section of the news feed were not participating in anti-social behavior. Much of what I saw were messages of support for Japan, suggestions for where people could go for help, or information being given out in response to questions. 

A combination of news/information sharing,
reactions, and calls to action

Some of the information was correct, and links to donation sites actually led to the appropriate place (mostly the Red Cross), but there were also incidents where well-intentioned people were giving out misinformation. There were people that had heard from the American branch of CNN that a nuclear reactor had already exploded, while live footage from Japan showed that the reactor was still intact. Users that could not speak Japanese were then confused, and there was a small panic in the comment, which was eventually quelled when someone translated the live feed and said that the reactor did not yet explode. CNN later changed the story as they were updated, so accurate information eventually circulated in the social section of that particular Ustream feed. 

What Liebenluft said in his article, "...the problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well," reminded me of the little exchanges I saw on the Ustream social networking feed. For those users that didn't stick around after reading the misinformation, it is a lot like they were trying to cheat on their homework but getting answers that would make the cheating all but meaningless, since they were wrong anyway. 

Regardless of the incorrect information being spread, it was always relatively quickly corrected. Why? I believe it was because of the presence of the live news stream alongside the social comment section. Incorrect information by users was refuted by the live news feeds and in general, attempts to propagate the misinformation were stamped out by a majority of users after the video feed contradicted it. 

The positive aspects of the social comment section included accurate links to places where people could send donations to Japan, first-hand reports from people near the areas affected (mostly in Japanese with some interaction from English speakers living in Japan), links to pictures from places being discussed in the news feed, and general information provided with links to things like the schedule for rolling blackouts and modified train service. Also quite valuable for users that don't speak Japanese were the live translations/summaries of what was being said on the news feed by users in the social comment section. 

I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that a more 'traditional format' like regular network news, can be enhanced by the presence of the online community with added-value like the translations and links mentioned above. The live video feeds also provided a good grounding source to prevent the misinformation that can often run rampant through internet discussions. I'm quite impressed with how the system has been working and will keep an eye on it in the future. 

Finding out through Facebook: Status updates from those affected by the quake

Not knowing a lot about the situation at the time and impatient to hear if my friends were OK, I tried calling their phones; both cellular and home lines. No one answered. I had friends in unaffected parts of Japan try and call as well. Once again, nobody answered the phone. I watched the news, as many did, and saw the City of Kesennuma, the city I once worked in, ablaze.

My stomach dropped and I scoured the internet for any and all scraps of information I could find about the situation in the city. I have yet to find out about many of my Japanese friends, as only some have been able to Email me regarding their safety, but I am keeping an eye out on the missing persons database Google has created in response to this situation. So far I know one of my friends is still missing, thanks to this database and am still hoping to hear he is safe. 

Online communities have also impressed me with how information--in this case the well-being of my friends--can be shared with a speed that would have been difficult before sites like Facebook. Here are a few screenshots:

An update from the sister of my friend
on his Facebook wall

A clip from the Facebook wall of my friend Rachel

Through this posting I was made aware that JET program officials had posted lists of their teachers that had reported they were safe and was able to find a few more names of friends in other parts of north eastern Japan. Beside updates on the statuses of my friends, I saw on Facebook an outpouring of support and links to donation sites for the disaster. 

Social filtering at work: A large majority of friends
in Japan posted earthquake relief and links to information
during roughly the same time. 

A large proportion of my friends on Facebook either work in, or are from Japan. Because of this, the status updates of friends that posted things unrelated to Japan seems to have been ignored by the status update algorithm Facebook uses in favor of the updates posted by my friends in Japan. I thought this was a relevant, personal example of social filtering at work.

Throughout this tragedy, I have never been more aware of the role social networks have come to play in how I acquire my news. Because of Facebook and Twitter updates I found out that some of my friends were safe, that there was a link to Ustream for me to get updated information from, and that there were places I could go to donate money to the earthquake relief effort. I can't state how grateful I am for these resources and will simply close with a plea for everyone to please remember the people of Japan during this difficult time. 

Japan Relief Links:

http://www.redcross.org/

http://ladygaga.shop.bravadousa.com/Product.aspx?cp=14781_42444&pc=BGAMLG88

http://www.timeout.jp/en/tokyo/feature/2532/japan-earthquake-how-you-can-help

Sources:

Lerman, Kristina (2007). Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg. Proceedings of Int. Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO. http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0612046v1

Leibenluft, Jacob (2007).  A Librarian's Worst Nightmare: Yahoo! Answers, where 120 million users can be wrong. Slate, 7 December 2007.  http://www.slate.com/id/2179393/fr/rss/ 

Interesting to Me

I have friends in Kesennuma City in Miyagi that frankly, I would not have known were safe without Facebook. The Huffingtonpost put up an interesting article about social networking and the response to the disaster in Japan: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/11/twitter-facebook-become-v_n_834767.html?ir=Technology

Session 4 - Social Capital and Vampires that Sparkle

The Communities

The Twilight series written by Stephanie Meyer describes the suspenseful, romantic, horrifying, and comedic (as the author once described it) adventures of young Kristen Swan, a bunch of vampires, and Native Americans. Judging by the sales of books and the multiple films they have spawned, it's not difficult to imagine that dedicated fans would create sites devoted to their beloved series. I have chosen two Twilight fan communities to join.


Perhaps because I'm a male, or because my heart has long since become a cold, dead cinder incapable of feeling, I've never really been interested in checking out the Twilight series. Maybe these two communities will teach me not only about social capital mechanisms, but also how to love again.

For the sake of simplicity, I joined two communities under the same name: 691ICS


The communities I joined were: The Bella and Edward Fanclub and Fan Forum (Twilight Saga)
The process to join both communities was simple and painless. A quick five minutes after arriving on each website, I was ready to enter the world of glittering vampires and wolf people.

The Edward and Bella Fan Club is a website devoted to the Twilight series. The community is largely composed (unsurprisingly) of teenage girls. Here is a snapshot of what this OC is all about:

Fan Forum is an interesting OC in that it includes a Twilight fan forum as just one of many options for fans of popular media. One could just as easily hop from the Twilight forum to a forum dedicated to Samuel L. Jackson while on the Fan Forum website. Although there are numerous forums for a user to go to, people in this community seem to stick to their fandom of choice. Their policies (buried deep in a thread with an unclear title) are outlined on the link below:

POLICIES

How do they treat new vampires (members)?

As a new member with limited knowledge on the subject matter, I decided to pose the same question twice in order to discover how they would treat a member with no social capital. To preserve anonymity and encourage responses I posed a 22 year old woman named Ino Chieki Sakai from Japan. Here are screenshots of my question as posted on each site:

Edward and Bella Fanclub

Fan Forum

Fan Forum

Comparing the Mechanisms

It was only on the Bella and Edward Fan Club site that I received an answer to my question. The Fan Forum response, though pleasant enough, did not in fact provide an answer. I checked again after a few days to see if there were any more responses on the Fan Forum, but my thread got lost in the shuffle after it was moved.

The nature of the Twilight Fan Forum means that interactions are primarily limited to forum discussions. Interaction occurs primarily on questions/discussion points posed by members that have established themselves as presences in the Twilight Fan Forum community. My initial post was apparently misplaced, and one of the "experts" as described the in the Gleave article, moved my post to the accepted location for such inquiries. There was a small bit of admonishment that served to maintain the "local norms" also discussed by Gleave.

The E&B Fan Club allowed me to post my question in the forum without any admonishment. There was less micro-managing of posts and all members were able to post new topics for discussion. The Ellison article mentioned that, "...detailed profiles highlight both commonalities and differences among participants." In terms of detailed profiles, the Edward and Bella Fan Site provides a level of customization that closely mimics MySpace and some of the features offered by Facebook. Because of this, and the ability to request people as friends, the E&B Fan Club feels more welcoming than Twilight Fan Forum.

"Bonding social capital" is easier to see on the E&B Fan Club because the level of customization of the personal profile allows members to somewhat passively let people learn more about them through the profile browsing feature. A friend request I received upon joining the E&B Fan Club was motivated by my character's location in Japan, which the user revealed to me via a private message.

First Friend Request

The level of "bonding social capital" apparent in the E&B Fan Club might make exiting the group somewhat difficult. Williams observation that, "When leaving the group represents a true loss of social, psychological, or practical benefits, a group member will exert effort to stay and contribute," is probably true in the case of the longest-lived members of the E&B Fan Club. They interacted more like the members of the Cullen family (the vampire family in the book), rather than a bunch of strangers online.

Suggested Improvements

The only suggestions I have for the E&B Fan Club to improve their website is a change in the font because I hated reading red on black, and perhaps instituting a badge or promotion system where users can get cool little badges similar to how the Huffington Post does it. Maybe giving the level-up system a vampire theme would put users deeper under the spell this website casts.  Otherwise, their site has a nice blend of "bonding social capital" and "bridging social capital" going on. People ask questions, get responses, birthdays are acknowledged, art is shared. The creators of this site show the same love and care for their community that Edward showed for Bella when he bared his soul to her during that time in the book.

For the Twilight Fan Forum, I suggest they make the community more welcoming to new users. I found it difficult to locate a place to put my introductory post. The way they cluster certain topics according to the senior members wishes seems somewhat arbitrary too. Though the "answer giver" that responded to my post was polite, I still didn't get a response. The community has barriers to entry that can be somewhat intimidating to the new user. They need to create a newbie thread and lock it at the top of the forum; otherwise, the whole thing will just be a conversation between a few 'elite' users that new members have to try and jump into.

The premise offered by Allen and company, that "...every node seeks to interact with another that is at least as cooperative as itself," is true in the case of the Twilight Fan Forum. The only instances of sustained interaction I saw were between the other veteran members of the board, all of which had somewhat similar post counts. Sustained interaction might have allowed me to climb my way up the social ladder on the forum, but I can't say for sure.

As the Twilight Fan Forum is forum-based, there is a lack of personal profile customization which is kind of the norm for this type of OC. A badge-type of system for contributors is already in place, as people get gold crowns for posting a lot. This is a good first step. However, they could open it up to allow more extensive personal pages with more than just a post count and a signature quote. Just like how Bella eventually opened up to Edward in the book, the Twilight Fan Forum needs to give its users a few more ways to open up to each other.

Final Thoughts

Choosing between the two OCs I looked at was much easier than when Bella had to choose between Edward and the wolf guy. Since Bella eventually chose (spoiler alert. Highlight to see.) Edward (according to Wikipedia), I'm going to have to say that the Bella and Edward Fan Club is in fact Edward, while the Twilight Fan Forum is the poor, neglected wolf guy. Thought I have not learned how to love again, I was pleasantly surprised by how well a fan site like the Bella and Edward Fan Club was able to make me feel involved in their community.


Final Project Ideas

I am interested in two forms of social computing not yet covered: Alternative Reality Games and/or Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. I am also open to taking a look at the Facebook games by Zynga.

Social networks formed around online games have had very real impacts on peoples' lives. Some have met online, fallen in love, and gotten married. Others have had marriages ruined because a spouse gets so involved with their online life in the games that their offline interactions suffer. There have even been murders over items that exist only on the servers of the company running the online game!

MMORPG/ARGs I would look at:
 
If I take a look at MMORPGs I might take a look at subscription-based vs. micro-transaction based games.

A look at ARGs would involve commercial and fan-made projects and the different ways they involve the internet to encourage particpation.



Questions I am thinking of investigating:

How do ARGs or MMORPGs form and maintain collaborative relationships between users?


(MMORPG specific)

What are the incentives for participation and how do developers sustain monetized participation by users in an MMORPG environment? How are social networks formed within the game?


(ARG specific)
How do ARGs involve users? What are the types of users that participate in ARGs? Do ARGs successfully leverage the online platform to encourage user participation?


Readings
Gleave, Eric, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento and Marc A. Smith (2009). A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ÔSocial RoleÕ in Online Community. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Allen, Stuart M., Gualtiero Colombo, Roger M. Whitaker (2009). Forming Social Networks of Trust to Incentivize Cooperation. Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, 5-8 January 2009.

Ellison, N.B., C. Steinfield and C. Lampe (2007). The Benefits of Facebook "Friends:" Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

Williams, D. (2006). On and Off the 'Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), article 11.
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/williams.html

Interesting to Me: Parts 2 and 3 of "The Secret History of Social Networking"

I'm an old man, so going out on the town on a Saturday night is no longer an option for me. Because of this, I listen to a lot of radio programs via the internet. Here are the last two parts of "The Secret History of Social Networking" for your enjoyment:

Part 2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y2f2s

The growth of Facebook

Part 3

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y5jgf

The future of social networking

Part 1 (If you missed it.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xw14v

Session Three

~Part 1~

The article Examining social media usage: Technology clusters and social network site membership, by Schrock, takes a look at extroversion, self-disclosure, self-efficacy, gender, and computer anxiety; and examines how these factors affect SNS membership. There is a possibility that extroverted people use SNS more than introverted people and just might scare the introverts off of SNS sites. (As an aside, Schrock noted that MySpace was populated by a small majority of females, but I have to wonder how many of those “female” profiles were actually dudes trolling their friends.)

Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online by Gefen and Ridings tackles the question: Why do people join online communities? The primary reasons they offer are: information exchange, social support exchange, friendship, and recreation. In my own experiences, these have all been the exact reasons I've hung out online; especially in the case of friendship/recreation. I used to play Lord of the Rings Online with a friend from Japan, mostly as an interactive chat-room that let us relax together.

These reasons are also discussed in the article Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities, by Akshay Java and company. Observations from the Java article, a 2007 study of micro-blogging, are still relevant when describing the behavior and kinds of users on Twitter. The authors of this article conducted a study of aggregate behavior in micro-blogging communities to understand both types of users and user intentions.

The types of user intentions described by Java are congruent with my own observations of how users behave on Twitter. Like many others, I used Twitter to keep up with the daily lives of friends and co-workers, have conversations and share information. Though I never used Twitter to get news about current events, I knew quite a few people that did follow users classified as an “Information Source,” in order to do so.

In Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities, author Steven Tedjamulia and three other people with less interesting names write an article in which ways to motivate user contributions to OCs are explored. Tedjamulia observes that community managers can bolster their member contributions by training them to use the OC and providing positive feedback mechanisms. There are feedback mechanisms on the Huffington Post, for example that include: post counts, # of followers (fans), badges that reward activity as a moderator/contributor/etc. These mechanisms, especially the badges that users can level up (they get a little number in the corner of the badge they level up), provide the kind of economical performance feedback that Tedjamulia and company wrote about.

Similar to the study by Tedjamulia, the article Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities by Kimberly Ling and her posse also looks at ways to motivate users to contribute. How to motivate “social loafers” was the big question in this study. They found that when individuals were given clear goals and reminded of what unique little snowflakes they were, they contributed to the OC more and that by giving people goals as a group, their participation was higher than those given individual goals. The E-mail manipulators used for their experiments were kind of weak, as they said, and I don’t really find myself motivated when websites try to use the same thing to spark up user participation.

Part 2

Enrique Iglesias, Mariah Carey, David Bowie, The Foo Fighters--all the great bards of our time have sung songs about heroes. I remembered these songs while helping an elderly woman cross the busy intersection near my apartment building and wondered if there were "real life superheroes" out there patrolling the streets. Was there a Spiderman or a Wonder Woman out there protecting the city from top-hat wearing muggers, senior citizen street gangs, and midgets with hammers? A quick search through the interwebs and I was well on my way to finding out.

Just like the old farm couple that found a baby from outer space in their fields, or the lucky nerd that was bitten by a radioactive spider and given amazing abilities, I lucked out and found an online community dedicated to superheroes.

My observation was conducted on The Real Life Superhero Forum,an OC belonging to a "Real Life Superhero Community". The forum is part of the http://www.reallifesuperheroes.org/ project.

Screenshot taken from www.reallifesuperheroes.org

Forum Main Page

Modes of Participation 

The RLSH forum allows superheroes access to these features: Post content, respond to posts, select user groups, send private messages, create polls, create user signatures, and upload their own avatars.

Participation Encouragement

1. Senior members of the forum are, as the general theme of the community indicates, incredibly welcoming to new members. 
2. Nice touches like acknowledgement of member birthdays.



User birthdays are acknowledged by the community.

3. Spam moderation is in effect.

   4. Posters can make friend lists.

  5. Questions are answered in a timely manner and the moderators help keep a positive vibe on the boards.

  6. Statistics are kept for each individual user and are open to the public. 

  7. Website keeps track of news events and posts recent forum commentary from users on the main page.

  8. There is a superhero manual available for newcomers to peruse. 

Content that drew the most responses: 

As the superhero community is still a growing one, new heroes ask appear to ask fairly common questions. The topic most important to heroes was uniform colors, with Comic Con being a close second. Increased media interest in real life superheroes most likely inspired recruiting as well. Citizens arrest was popular because a real life superhero is still a citizen, so one might as well be as informed as possible on what they can do to prevent crime. 

1. Uniform Colors: 159 replies, 2941 views
2. Comic Con: 97 replies, 1468 views
3. TV Shows: 46 replies, 556 views
4. Recruiting: 41 replies, 1268 views
5. Citizens Arrest:  22 replies, 624 views

Final Thoughts:

The superhero community, though not what most of us are used to, is still a community. They have leveraged online resources to create a group that appears to be fairly tight-knit. There's a familial vibe to the interactions between users of the RLSH forums. Some more prominent members have created personal blogs that attract commentary from other super heroes that are also members of the forum. The community has grown large enough that a movie has been made about some of its more prominent members:

http://current.com/entertainment/movies/blog/92969198_real-life-superheroes-get-their-own-film.htm

I actually noticed, as said in the Tedjamulia article, that the more "visible" members of the community, with names recognized outside of the forums by newspapers and the like, were quite prolific contributors to the forums. Much of their advice also seemed geared to nurture new heroes and help build group identity.

The Ling article made the point that participation can be encouraged by giving individuals an idea of how unique their contribution is. I kind of doubted just a little at first, but I noticed that in the real life superhero community, they really do respond to having their uniqueness noticed. Thanatos, one of the more prominent members of the community, contributed to a film project about real life superheroes. Superhero (yes that's his name. :P) was at first reluctant to participate in the project, but after finding out Thanatos had his unique contributions recognized, seemed eager to join in at the prospect of having his own uniqueness recognized. The addition of the film project having a sort of group goal might also have had an impact as the guest from the post above Superhero's said he participated to help Thanatos and the film crew out. 

It's interesting to see the effect that discussions in OCs can have on offline projects like the aforementioned film.

If Schrock had done an analysis of the real life superhero community, he might have noticed there are more male members than female members. In regards to the RLSC, gender certainly does appear to play a role in membership. There are women in the community, just very very few.

In the end, I was surprised to see that there are actually people out there (aside from police, firefighters, EMTs, military, etc.) who will go out into their communities to try and do some good. Though I lack the necessary motivation and costume sewing skills needed to join them, I respect the mission of real life superheroes. They genuinely look like they care about helping out their communities. Excelsior!


Readings:

Ridings, Catherine and David Gefen (2004).  Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 10(1). http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue1/ridings_gefen.html

Ling, K., G. Beenen, P. Ludford, X. Wang, K. Chang, X. Li, D. Cosley, D. Frankowski, L. Terveen, A.M. Rashid, P. 

Resnick and R. Kraut (2005). Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/ling.html

Tedjamulia, Steven J.J., David R. Olsen, Douglas L. Dean, Conan C. Albrecht (2005).  Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory. Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Schrock, Andrew (2009).  Examining Social Media Usage: Technology Clusters and Social Network Site Membership. First Monday 14(1).http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2242/2066

Java, Akshay, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin and Belle Tseng (2007). Why We Twitter: Understanding the Microblogging Effect in User Intentions and Communities. Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, 12 August 2007, San Jose, California.  http://workshops.socialnetworkanalysis.info/websnakdd2007/papers/submission_21.pdf