http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk

Okay, so that’s a game theory concept right there, but it’s also a big underlying current in the stuff I’ve been talking about.  This is Friday, so I’m going to be quick about it with this one.

Commenting on Wednesday’s post, Scott Acker said:

You know, at the beginning of this it was a bit like seeing the ‘trick’ behind the magician. Like where you learn how they saw the lady in half and what not. A little weird and deflating. Not because I didn’t know how this stuff works but I guess its strange having it pointed out and its you, me, etc that [you're] talking about.

And I replied:

You know, it’s easy to read this and employ the advice and do it for completely mercenary reasons only. But that’s not the magic trick, really, that’s just capable sleight of hand. For the actual magic, you have to employ all this with absolutely genuine intent to *be* that peer, to *be* respectful — not just to act like it. If you’re not authentic in that regard, that will become apparent at some point. You’ve got to mean it and live it. I’m not sure I can teach that part; some days I feel like I’m still trying to manage it myself.

At the core of all of this is that game theory idea that “Nash” was on about: doing what’s good for the group (the community) and what’s good for the individual (the community organizer).  Consistency in picking the best options in front of you — where “best” is defined as the greatest aggregate good for both you and your community — pays out.

If you constantly prioritize your community without giving any heed to your own needs in the formula, running the community is going to wear you thin and leave you resentful. It’s going to kill the reason you got that community going in the first place. In the long term, that’s not only bad for your personal joy but also for the community.

If you constantly prioritize your needs over the community’s, at best you’re going to drop the ball a lot and end up feeding into a trend towards stagnancy.  At worst, you’ll come off as a tyrant, and it won’t be stagnancy you’ll be dealing with — it’ll be mutiny.

So what you do is prioritize both.  And in doing so, you’re in easy grasp of that authenticity, that genuine intent I’m talking about.  If the things you do are good for you and good for your community, then there’s no conflict between a selfless motive and a self-interested motive.  And that makes it much easier to be positive about the whole enterprise — for everyone.

You could see someone saying this about the whole Dresden Files Disclosure Pledge thing I talked about on Wednesday: “Sure, Fred’s going to make a few extra sales because he’s doing this — but he’s also giving the fans out there a chance to get at all sorts of information about the game that they wouldn’t normally with another company.” The move both serves the self (Evil Hat) and the community (fans of the Dresden Files and fans of Fate). So it works, and works well from what I can see.

I’m shading over to talking about the Evil Hat side of things, here, and that’s for a reason.  “The individual” and “the company” are pretty similar when you talk about community building strategies, as is “the community” and “the customers and fans”.  One and the same, really, for these purposes.  So all the stuff I’ve been saying about community building applies equally to customer building, to fan building.

Which means you can apply these things as sales techniques.  And that sounds pretty mercenary … until you zero in on the game theory lesson again.  Applying that, it becomes clear that the trick isn’t just to prioritize the company — i.e., the maximized profit motive — when making decisions as a game publisher. And it’s not to prioritize the customers either. The trick is to prioritize both.

And so, at Evil Hat, we have the Disclosure Pledge for the DFRPG, we have PDFs bundled for free with print products, we have the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee, we have our general effort to participate with our customers as equals rather than as voices-of-authority, and we have an orientation towards maximum possible transparency as a business.

And, sure: if I factored out the customer angle in the business decisions I’m talking about, and just looked at the company’s, it might well be that I’m making a number of decisions that are less than optimized for the company’s best interests.  I’m certainly investing more work in making those things happen than I “have to”.  But add the customer angle back in, and I think Evil Hat is managing to strike pretty close to the greatest good, there. And long-term, I think that the community-focused benefits form a big feedback loop that makes it actually even better for the company’s “self interest”.

As a publisher, you’re not selling to faceless customers — or at least, you shouldn’t be.  Make those personal connections.  Pull them up on stage and make them awesome with you.  Organize them together in a way that best suits growing as a community.  Because they’re not your customers, they’re your community.  Don’t hold your community at a remove.

Participate.  Deputize. Celebrate. And they’ll celebrate you back.

The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community.  In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t.  (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)

The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.

Before we get into that particular toolbox, I want to talk about the role of the blog, the twitter, the facebook presence in all of this (substitute your favorite social media site of choice).  In a very real way, these are at least micro-communities in their own right, each organized around the central “followed” person or organization and the followers.

A social media presence has an element of personal connection baked right into it, and it is very, very easy for followers to feel like they’re just one degree separate from the person they’re following even if they’ve never actually met or had direct conversation with them.  This feeling is cemented and amplified every time the followed replies to a comment by a follower. The personal connection made to one person feels like a personal connection made to all the followers, via transitive, representative interaction.

If the followers are deep, fervent fans, that sort of interaction is akin to something I saw at a rock festival a few years ago. Green Day was playing (they’re a fantastic live band) in front of tens of thousands of people.  For their next song they call out to the stadium: anybody out there know how to play a guitar?  Several friends of one dude near the front start pointing emphatically at him.  So Billie-Joe Armstrong points right at the dude. “You can play the guitar? Are you fucking serious? Because if you can’t and we bring you up here, everyone in this stadium is going to laugh at you.” I’m rows and rows and rows away but it’s clear the dude is nodding and the crowd around him is lifting him up, getting him to the stage.  The energy in the whole joint goes up several notches.  And the guy gets lobbed onto the stage.  And Green Day hands him a guitar. And he plays through the song with them.  We all played through the song with Green Day, because that’s that representational interaction, that personal connection made to one person that translates out to everyone else in the community.

Social media makes it possible for the inequality boundary to vanish.  It takes us from being creators and fans to just being peers of one another, at least partially.  This peer-to-peer relationship is what can induce and strengthen an emotional connection that a fan feels for an artist.  It’s very potent. The effect exists, and when we take on the role of being a Followed Person instead of a follower, we need to be mindful of it and make the most out of it.  This is that improv principle that’s shown up in indie gaming in action: “here’s how I make you awesome”.  Because when a FP reaches out to a follower, the follower gets that warm fuzzy leveling-up feeling.  And when an FP is a dick to a follower, well, the things you might expect happen, too.  Nobody wants to be a fan of an ass unless that ass is in their corner.

But to come at this sort of presence — like the one I maintain here at Deadly Fredly — from another angle, these venues also offer an element of heightened inequality as well.  Not a paradox: because I interact with you in the comments of my blog, we’re having a peer-to-peer connection; but because it’s my blog, there’s also an implicit authority model in place that I wouldn’t necessarily experience as your peer on a forum or mailing list we both happen to frequent (but not run).

And in a nutshell, that right there is part of why I’m not much for participating in forums any more.  As much as I try to destroy the perception of “the authority that speaks from on high” in venues such as these (as well as on mailing lists and forums that I do run), I rely just a touch on that authority too to enforce an element of respectfulness in the discourse that goes on in those places.

But I have to do that lead-by-example thing as much as possible: to get respect by giving respect, to speak to people as peers, but to take clear, polite action as that authority when conversations are going outside the bounds of what I think is acceptable.  Managing to do all three of these in a community you’re running — whether it’s a micro-community like the commenters on a blog, or a “macro” community like JimButcherOnline.com — is not easy.  The voice of authority can sound like the voice of condescension, and that is absolutely poisonous to the idea of peer-to-peer respect.  I have left forums in the past over such leadership failures, and I’d expect the same from people on my own when I louse it up.

So the core trick in this particular ramble is simply stay aware and stay on top of acting like a peer rather than an authority.  Golden rule, here’s how I make you awesome, yadda yadda.  If this one approach is your hammer and you try to treat every problem like a nail, you actually won’t go that wrong with it (save for in those moments where the Mr. Nice Guy element of it can end up undermining your ability to put a stop to something objectionable).

So if that’s the tool in your box, what are the ways you can finesse its use?  A couple things, to wrap this up:

Celebrate: Your followers have cool ideas too. Do not fail to point at them and call them cool. Better yet, make it clear you see those ideas as cool as or cooler than your own (because they are, in the same way that your kid is cooler than you are; maybe you spawned that idea, but seeing it take a life of its own trumps the original).  This is essentially what Green Day did.  The guy they got up on stage wasn’t as good of a guitarist as their guitarist was, but he didn’t need to be to be, in that moment, the coolest damn guy in the stadium.  Celebrating a follower’s idea destroys that whole inequality aspect of the paradigm in ways that kick off a party.  A community that parties together stays together, grows together.  There’s a reason the Evil Hat guys will offer their perspectives on the FateRPG mailing list, but never declare someone else’s different idea as any less valid (except in terms of whether we’d use it in our own play).  We’re in the business of celebrating the ideas that get kicked off by our products — not the ideas of our products.  That’s what being a game publisher is about.

Deputize: This is, really, the big one. It’s celebration on steroids.  It’s what you do when you take someone from that community of yours and give them some of the power in the authority you have as a nominal “head” of the community.  You’re not pulling someone onto the stage to play a song; you’re picking someone out of the audience and making them a member of your band, for keepsies.

It’s often pretty easy to figure out who should be deputized.  They’re your best fans, the ones who are really regularly adding good positive energy and support to the community.  They’re the people who are making your life easier by running off and compiling that list of information about the books y’all are so geeked about, or finding links all over the ‘net about your particular fandom and bringing them back to the community table so everyone can get pumped about ‘em.  They’re the people who speak up when you say “Hey, I could use a little help with…”

Rather than get into a generalized perspective on deputizing your best fans, I’ll get into some quick examples from my own experience. I’ve done this several times, in several ways, so this will be a cross-section at best.

Lenny: That guy who’s the lead system developer for The Dresden Files RPG, and Fate in general at this point? Yeah. He’s a community member from the FateRPG mailing list who regularly posted showing keen insights as to the nature of the system, the finesse of play, all that.  He and I started chatting about Fate after several of his posts caught my eye.  After a while it became clear he had an incredible amount of energy for what we wanted to do, so I asked him to help us get Spirit of the Century to completion.  It was ten kinds of rocky as Rob and I tried to figure out how to go from a duo to a trio on this, but we pushed through the work (eventually — I had my own flameouts here and there, everyone did) and ended up with a really satisfying new iteration of Fate in SOTC.  There’s a reason Lenny’s name is on the cover of that game: his relentness energy for Fate kept things going when fatigue was taking the rest of us.  Deputizing him has paid off in spades.

Priscilla: Priscilla Spencer’s one of the original superfans on Jim Butcher Online.  She’s a constant, positive presence there. She collated and maintained the timeline of the Dresden Files books. She posted a lot.  Hard not to notice her, and notice how much of a contribution she was making.  So I invited her to help moderate the forum.  That went well.  Then I started to notice how much I was failing to update the news items on the main jim-butcher.com website, so I asked her if she’d be willing to take that on too (she usually scooped the rest of us on newsworthy Jim items anyway).  Jim noticed her too. She also happens to be a capable artist.  Got a copy of First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher?  Like the Map of Alera found inside?  Art credit on that: Priscilla Spencer.  In my particular corner of fandom, she’s the guy up on stage strumming the guitar along with Green Day.

Rick, Stacey, Scott: There are plenty of other names I could list here, too. Each of these people — Rick Neal, Stacey Chancellor, Scott Acker — are part of the alpha testing crew that we assembled for the Dresden Files RPG.  When I assembled the Alpha groups, I didn’t have them sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). I had them sign a Disclosure Pledge — they had to promise that they’d get out there on the net and actively talk about the playtesting experience, offering perspective, answering questions, and (frankly) achieving a grass-roots free advertising effect.  Each of these are accomplishing this in different ways.  Scott has helped make sure talk about the Dresden Files RPG occurs on RPG.net and in other venues, and he’s run several demo sessions of the game at conventions (rather than just running the game for a private group of playtesters).  Stacey makes sure the Dresden Files RPG community on LiveJournal gets updated about the progress of things, helping us cover that vector for getting the word out.  And Rick Neal — man, Rick Neal.  You want to see what he’s doing for us, go read his Dresden Files posts over on his blog — which he started, originally, to satisfy the Disclosure Pledge’s requirements.  It’s turned into a real destination for me, and not just because he talks occasionally about the game we’ve been working on.  These are all the result of a (stealth) act of mass deputizing — the Disclosure Pledge is all about doling out portions of the authority to speak publicly about the game Evil Hat is working on.

One thing you might notice in these examples is that in each case, the deputized folks are able to get more accomplished on the part of the community than I was able to do by myself.  That’s the true benefit of deputizing.  Communities that exceed the leadership’s ability to push for growth and activity will fall apart in some way (not necessarily die; just fall into chaos).  Deputizing is how leadership can grow in response to the growth of a community, and it uses the peer-to-peer value of those occasional personal connections to do it.  And every time it happens, it brings along the rest of the community for the ride.

Rock on.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little.  Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.

Communities result from common interest, collected into one place, focused on an exploration of its enthusiasms.  In that respect, you need to locate those common interests that have a critical mass and build on that, or you need to create common interests and focus them into a critical mass.  I’m not sure that there’s much I can say about the “how” of that, because you either have something that many people are interested in or you don’t.

That said if you’ve generated lots of smaller interests, you might be able to aggregate them usefully to create a larger common interest.  On the opposite end of the spectrum it’s possible you can have too much mass for your, uh, “containment mechanism”, to the point where the enthusiasm getting generated is in excess of the members’ ability to parse through it.  So there’s definitely some right-sizing going on here.

For small press games, there’s a very real chance that there’s not enough quantity of interest in an individual product to sustain a mailing list or a forum.  By “sustain”, I mean generate regular self-producing traffic to the extent that the community doesn’t fall into stagnancy.

If the publisher only produces that one game, they’re going to be out of luck in terms of having a viable community on their own.  If the publisher produces multiple games, it might be possible to create community around the aggregated interest in the publisher’s entire body of works, though that can be tenuous as wildly different styles of games are going to have a hard time finding enough common areas of overlap for the community to hang together sustainably.

If you’re such a publisher without that quantity of interest available (the critical mass), your only real path of action is to direct fans (and yourself) to larger communities that align with the interest you do have.  That means putting on your swamp gear and wading into the mucky territory of online gaming forums: RPGNet, Story-Games, the Forge, etc.  That’s no guarantee your area of interest will thrive there, but if it dies there it’ll be from something other than the lack of feeding it gets as a solo endeavor.

Once you do have that critical mass, it’s a case of right-sizing how you contain and focus it.

For most focused interest communities, at their inception, a web forum is not the right idea.  Web forums require people to remember they exist, and need to be interesting and important enough that the members have an incentive to make time in their days to venture out onto the Internet and check in at this specific destination.  Web forums also fragment conversation: people can participate in a single thread or a small selection of threads, and ignore all the rest.  For those small focused interests, that can be deadly, and will often lead to stagnancy rather than sustainability.  For this reason I only look to web forums as the solution for high levels of traffic and conversation, where the conversation is so active that it would drive more people away from a mailing list than it would bring in.

A mailing list is like a forum with a single thread. In order to participate, you have to parse at least on a basic level every message that comes through (even if that act of parsing is “nope, no interest, delete” or “do the subject lines in this digest interest me?”).  That’s a pain in the ass for large and highly varied conversations, but it’s perfect for focusing a lower-traffic interest into one continuous “stream” with enough mass and energy to become sustainable.  (If a mailing list version of your community is falling stagnant, moving to a forum won’t fix it; you simply do not have enough mass there to do the job. See above for what to do then.)

A lot of what I’m talking about here is art rather than science. I’m not putting numbers or quantified frequencies on what I’m talking about, because I can’t.  I do it by “feel”, and your “feel” very likely does not match mine.

There’s a point at which a mailing list feels dead or stagnant: that means the community doesn’t have a critical mass.  There’s a point at which a mailing list feels too damn busy for people to keep up with and still do everything else that’s important in their lives.  That’s where you have too much mass for your container, and it’s time to consider a move to a web forum, where your community’s nascent subcommunities can all coexist and occasionally cross over to one another conveniently without it feeling to the members like these interests are constantly intruding.

So as a community-runner, you need to keep an eye on these trends and be willing to take action when it’s clear that the community’s location is not a good fit for the community’s level of activity.

A few real-world examples from my experience:

The FateRPG Yahoo Group (a mailing list) is where we took conversation about the Fate variant of Fudge when it threatened to get large enough to drown out rest of the traffic on the original Fudge community mailing list.  It has stayed in this form for its entire lifespan to date.  Occasionally bits of off-topic conversation can pop up, but at this point it allows for discussions of Fate in general, Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, and Diaspora — as well as some other fan-produced variations.  Traffic is reasonably constant but rarely overwhelming.  There’s no reason to split it off to a forum, even though I’ve had it suggested to me before.  Frankly I think a forum version would just result in a lack of sufficient traffic; I’m betting the move would take an active community that’s thriving in its current “container” and put it into an environment where things would fizzle. Folks would leave due to the transition, and those that remained wouldn’t keep the conversation going enough for the value of community to really work.

Here, I’ll pick on my good friend Chad Underkoffler a bit to talk about another mailing list community I’m in occasional contact with. Chad insists on giving each of his individual PDQ-derived products their own mailing list.  Most of them have little to zero traffic.  While he has recently (at a fan’s request) started a general PDQ interest mailing list, that’s been done without shutting down the other specific-product lists and funneling traffic to the one place.  I suspect — though this is just my gut feeling — that this move is keeping the PDQ fans at large from achieving a critical mass.  The versions of PDQ in each individual product are not so different that there wouldn’t be plenty of value in some cross-over talk amongst the various small groups of people interested in each.  The Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies group has perhaps the best chance right now of sustainability, though part of the energy burst happening there is due to its relatively recent publication.  But who knows? I could be wrong. I just think that the various sub-groups of the PDQ community have much more to offer each other as a collective entity than they do as satellites nominally orbiting one another.

The Jim Butcher online community started as a mailing list a decade or so ago that I called McAnallys, named after the pub in the Dresden Files.  It worked great for the first few years of Jim’s post-publication career.  We encouraged a pub-like atmosphere, where folks could talk about whatever so long as we always circled back around to the reason we were gathered together in one place: Jim’s writing.  But Jim kept getting more and more popular, and the mailing list got to the point where it could kick out multiple long digests in a single day.  Plenty of folks on the list liked the fact that it was a mailing list, that they didn’t have to go out and check a forum, but the conversations were just too active. That started to create an “insider effect”, where the list was active and hoppin’ and great for the people who were already there and thriving in it, but which ended up being unpleasant to get into as a new member.  The thirsty man could either go thirsty or try to drink from a firehose pointed right in his face.  So I bit the bullet and moved the community to a web forum.

Today’s web forum on JimButcherOnline.com is still crazy-active, but by being a forum we’ve managed to support the continued idea of a pub atmosphere for some members, while allowing others to focus their interests only on the parts of the conversation that are actually about Jim’s works.  The “pub” area dates back to July 2007, with 93980 Posts over 2651 Topics. It outnumbers the board that discusses, say, the books of the Dresden Files by a 3-to-1 factor, and that’s after some pruning.

We absolutely lost some people in the transition — which is part of why I advocate making a move after a mailing list feels too busy, not in anticipation of it getting there. Change by its nature cuts off some of the old guard. In this regard, I was something of a casualty in the move to a web forum.  I just don’t directly participate that much these days, unless you’re talking about the Dresden Files RPG board on the forum. The way I work, I need something to intrude a little for me to participate in it.  At least a forum lets me pick & choose in that regard — I can subscribe to a thread that interests me, and it’ll “intrude” on my mailbox when something happens there.

…

So that’s my take on communities and the management of their critical mass. The term is particularly apt here. A community is a volatile substance. You have to handle it carefully.  Bring too little of it together and you might get a little radioactive but you won’t produce sustainable energy.  Bring too much of it together and it’ll blow up on you — unless you can contain it in something that can turn the explosive possibilities back into a sustainable energy source.  When it comes down to it, that’s what you want: the presence of enough common interest in one place that people fuse together and vibrate excitedly about the discovery of enthusiastic peers. That’s a community.