Last year I swore that I wasn’t going to volunteer to speak at SXSW. Last year I had to cut my party time short in order to get some rest before my early morning session. But SXSW is showing itself to be like the mob: just when you think you’re out…they pull you back in. I’ve ended up with two panels.
Managing Communities that Work
11:30a-12:30p on Saturday, March 8
Miles Sims from Small World Labs is running this session, and as soon as get more details, I’ll pass them along.
Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way
3:30p-4:30 on Friday, March 7
I’ve been asked to moderate a very cool panel with a great cast of characters and a fun subject. The panel is called “Edit Me! How Gamers are Adopting the Wiki Way”, and will take place on 7 March at 3:30p. Please stop by if you’re planning on heading to SXSW.
The current next-gen landscape has fostered a gaming environment with unprecedented level of interactivity and depth. As gameplay becomes increasingly more involved, and switching costs decrease, developers and publishers are having to take a closer look at the community ecosystem forming around their products.
The proliferation of fan-run community sites, wikis in particular, have become an integral cog of the community machinery. Due to the ever-changing and collaborative characteristics of a wiki, these sites tend to have more extensive and up to date information than most other online or offline community resources. Game wikis have long served as defacto references and databases for the largest MMO’s and Guilds (www.wowwiki.com, www.ffxiclopedia.org, and www.eq2i.com to name a few) and have enjoyed high use awareness within the communities. As more games start to incorporate MMO-like community elements, wikis are being created at record rates to support communities for games in every genre and platform. In addition to being great resources, the wikis themselves have become a sub-community of a particular game, typically including some of the most passionate and influential players of a game. Monitoring and engaging with the wiki communities has become another way for a developer to monitor the pulse of their community and gain real-time feedback.
This panel will examine game wiki communities, how they fit within the game community landscape, how developers are leveraging this new community medium, and what to expect in the future as more and more gamers start to take community management into their own hands.
Confirmed Panelists so far include:
- Angie Shelton – Wikia
- April Burba – Community Director, NC Soft
- George Pribul – College student and Lead Admin of the 2nd largest wiki on the planet (behind Wikipedia), wowwiki.com
