Field Trip #3: I suggested Wizard101, but I was almost expecting one of my fellow students to shoot it down. To my surprise, they did not, and we wound up there this week!
One of the biggest things I wanted to show people in Wiz was the chat systems. It’s somewhat restrictive for new users to learn, but it’s clear (to me) that a lot of time and effort went into the design and refinement, with one goal in mind–making it safe for children to use.
For those under 13, Menu Chat offers pre-selected canned phrases and commands. Some of these can be quite complex, and there’s a lot of alternate expressions that can be used for different “flavor” in communication.
Text Chat is available for users 13 and up. This is more flexible, but even then, it’s not as simple as you might expect. There’s a filter, but it’s not a blacklist. It’s a contextual whitelist. The whitelist part is easy enough–it understands “neighborhood” (the American spelling), but not “neighbourhood” (the Canadian spelling). So it allows one, but preemptively filters the other. The contextual part is more interesting to me–individually, the words “in,” “your,” and “pants” are all allowed. But string them together, and “in your pants” is immediately blocked. KingsIsle figured out quickly that it wasn’t sufficient to only block particular words; compound phrases composed of innocuous words could quickly become problematic as well. So the whitelist must also have a human-coded understanding of context.
We couldn’t test this during the field trip, because it requires actually putting money into the game, but from experience I know that Open Chat is also available for users verified 18+. That uses a standard blacklist to filter profanities, rather than the contextual whitelist. It’s therefore the most open and freest chat experience available, given it’s intended for adult users. Users can only see chat from other players at their level. So as an Open Chat user, I can say many things that will appear censored to Text Chat users. And both of those will be completely invisible to Menu Chat users. So there are indicators in the text balloons and user nameplates to show what each person is capable of seeing, in order to allow users to calibrate their outbound communications appropriately.
No, there’s no voice chat in the game, but the chat systems have had a lot of thought and design put into them, and I’ve always thought that was worthy of respect and technical appreciation.
On a more administrative level, I sort of wish we had created a channel for voice communication, rather than just text chat outside of the game. Juggling two different forms of text chat in two different applications is a little more challenging than one text chat in game and voice in the background to relay things like “And here’s how it appears when I type…” Ah well. It was still a good learning adventure, I would say.
Artifact: So. This starts with reviewing the background of what exists, why it exists, and how it’s not working.
I assist with a non-profit. It runs several community events, staffed entirely with volunteers. By design, the non-profit doesn’t want to get involved in the day-to-day of the individual events, but does provide infrastructure that is intended to last through multiple years. (Volunteers come and go, but the infrastructure needs to stick around and be maintained.) Volunteers are always a resource we could use more of. Some of our existing volunteers work for more than one event, and any event will often call for assistance from their “sister” events.
One style of event coordination is to have a series of separated groups in Telegram. Nobody sees anything except for the groups they are already in, and there’s no way for people from other events to be able to offer advice or support, unless they’re first invited into a specific group… which they may not even know exists. It’s therefore difficult to coordinate people effectively, because people in one group may be discussing one plan while the main group is discussing a different plan for the same task, and neither of them realize this until the two plans collide.
My considered solution to this was a single, centralized Discord server for the non-profit. Each event could have a “folder” of channels dedicated to them, with a single “general” catch-all for cross-event chatter. Within each event “folder,” multiple channels could be created, whether for departments or even specific events within the main event… that would be up to each individual event to determine for themselves, and they could also manage their own permissions, to determine who can post in what sections (for example, a main “announcements” channel might have posting permissions limited to specific people). Volunteers at different events could then “drop in” and get excited about what’s happening, be encouraged to assist with their sister event, and freely offer suggestions or support as needed. And since people can see what groups already exist, there’s less chance of accidentally losing track of people or having particular departments grow too isolated.
That was my thinking, at least. There’s just one slight problem–people aren’t using it. Volunteers have been “allowed” to join the Discord server, but without buy-in from the main planners in the event’s community, there’s no actual usage and therefore no momentum or critical mass which would allow the benefits to become visible.
Some of this is due to the particular event’s unwillingness to listen or be guided by those they do not judge to be part of their community. Some of it is also due to their insistence that they continue to use Telegram regardless of its less-than-optimal group interaction, even when volunteers ask for a better alternative.
This leads me to research. This is very much a problem of a social network, without having anything to do with platforms or specific services (at least as I see it). Yet I wasn’t entirely sure how to phrase what I was looking for, and my search ended up being somewhat general to groups, social networks, and chaos. (This was mostly because I wanted to determine what about a group might pull it towards a chaotic system of hidden subgroups rather than an ordered approach of group-visible subgroups.)
Two research papers caught my attention, and I’m reading through them now. The first, Order from Chaos, is an interesting read (and a long one, which is why I’m still digging through it!) about how collectives might try to avoid “managerial control” and still deal with the challenges of coordinating collective action for a common purpose. It caught my eye largely because that’s exactly the struggle I can see in this particular group–they don’t want to be “managed” or controlled in any way, and especially by any “outsiders” to their community. (Which still frustrates me–their definition of “community” is geographically-bound and takes no account of other commonalities.) So possibly I might glean some alternate thoughts on structure from this. But, this group does exhibit a desire for some managerial control; they’re just choosy about whom they allow in that role. So I’m not entirely sure that this entirely fits the bill. I’m not trying to rewrite their entire internal structure, just trying to figure out what they might be seeking by avoiding an ordered, open approach to their internal communications and coordination.
(I did find it particularly funny when I read the line: “Despite the shared motives of individuals devoted to direct, inclusive participation, their intentions for social change often dissolved into an ‘endless meeting’ in which they struggled to make decisions.” That is 100% what happens, every single damn time! Everybody’s frustrated when no decisions are made and there’s so much time spent, but everybody’s frustrated when somebody else makes a decision or says “we’re out of time to spend on this one topic.”)
Team Social Network Structure and Resilience was a shorter read, and was a fascinating simulation of team performance using either random or scale-free-like patterns of interaction. The analysis confirms what I would expect, namely that a higher-degree of interaction among everybody on a team leads to a greater degree of resilience and higher performance. The even distribution of a random pattern provides this. In real terms, it never hurts to hear ideas from people outside your department as well as inside of it. If you only listen to people in your specific department, there is a much higher risk of groupthink, tunnel vision, and other social conditions. Plus, as a volunteer organization, it’s really quite difficult to get up any sort of excitement and motivation if nobody knows what you’re doing, and you don’t know (and can’t find out) what anybody else is doing.
The alternative that was examined, scale-free-like pattern, is somewhat similar to the existing setup, but not completely. There are indeed only a few hubs–people who are in multiple subgroups–but I expect there’s more interaction within the subgroups among those members present. This seems like it would be more like what is identified as a block-diagonal pattern, which is more modular. But for my purposes, I think it’s reasonable to say the open-access (randomized) pattern seems to be a better option to shoot for.
So… how to do it. To some extent, I think the biggest problem so far has been that, absent a managerial decision to push towards Discord, there’s really no benefit for anybody to be in Discord. There’s no conversations happening there, and you have to be in Telegram in order to see anything or get anything done. But what if those two were bridged, such that people in Discord could be heard in Telegram, and people in Telegram could be heard in Discord? This is what I think I want to experiment with, at least right now.
References:
Massa, F. G., & O’Mahony, S. (2021). Order from chaos: How networked activists self-organize by creating a participation architecture. Administrative Science Quarterly, 66(4), 1037-1083. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392211008880
Massari, G. F., Giannoccaro, I., & Carbone, G. (2023). Team social network structure and resilience: A complex system approach. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 70(1), 209-219. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2021.3058237
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