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A Night at Milliways - Part Two

Submitted by Richard on Mon, 2006-03-13 08:50.
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» View Paper 2-- Regulating Behavior | login to post comments | 871 reads
Ryan Cannon's picture

Pushing the discussion on Milliway's bar

Submitted by Ryan Cannon on Thu, 2006-03-16 00:44.

Richard - I enjoyed your paper. It was quite thorough and you did a superb job of documenting your observations and relating them back to the course material—two things with which I definitely struggled. I would, however, like to push your discussion of how applying more of the concepts from the course could improve the community at Milliways.

You commented that Milliways had very few ways of measuring and establishing reputation, and stated that a quantifiable means of establishing reputation would not benefit the community. Based on your description, I take it that the reputation system has grown organically through personal relationships and has stabilized around small cliques or coteries of players at different times, and that these sections of the community do not often interact.

I'm imagining award for quality role-play or writing—perhaps given once a month or less frequently. Players could submit their best works, and the winners would be listed somewhere more or less permanent on the site. Such a system might both provide incentives for creating higher-quality work, and encourage players within the game to interact with players they normally wouldn't have, due to their reputation.

I also imagine that there are two types of players within the game—those who excel at the synchronous, AIM Chat Room, and those whose strength lies in their asynchronous writing. Are the AIM Chat Room sessions logged and posted? If not, how might posting those logs change the balance within the community?

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Thanks very much, Ryan. You

Submitted by Richard on Sun, 2006-03-19 06:31.

Thanks very much, Ryan. You very perceptively noted exactly where I was being a bit dodgy. I was really struggling with this paper because I knew as I was writing it that I would be making it available to the Milliways community. For that reason, I had to address issues of conflict resolution and, in particular, reputation very carefully. You're quite correct that reputations in the community have evolved informally and organically.

I very much agree with you that an award for good role-playing and/or good writing would probably raise the standard for both in Milliways. In that respect, I think it would be a positive addition. I also agree that it would generate more interaction--but it's what kind of interaction that concerns me.

I worry that an award like that would introduce a very poisonous strain of  competitiveness into the community. Role-playing and fiction writing are very personal activities, and they can leave people feeling vulnerable and defensive. If a person is enrolled in a writing program, he or she learns (often the hard way) how to deal with criticism and react positively to it. (Or at least that's the idea.)

I suspect most of the Milliways players haven't gone through that sort of program, and while the public nature of the game must be putting most of them through a kind of 'toughening up' process regarding criticism, I'm not sure how well they'd react to seeing actual awards going to other players. Especially if the awards were authorized by the moderators, or by a formal group of judges, and then went to players or cliques who other players considered 'inside.'

You're correct to suggest that some players have more of a presence in chat than they do in the game. This was something I started to address in the first part of my paper, but I'll have to emphasize and clarify it more in the final version. There are two supporting LiveJournal pages for memorable quotes: 'milliquotes' is for LiveJournal threads, and 'milli_crack' is for exchanges in the chat room. The chat room quotes tend to be brief and funny, but they do capture contributions to the community that might otherwise be lost.

And they're also a kind of informal prize, come to that, because most of the posted quotes are contributed by other players. But insofar as they are not mandated by the mods or made an official part of the community, I think they avoid the problems I note above.
 

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