LynxGB said:
So is this a community or not? Dosnt seem like one!!!
I'm lacking the original context as I'm not signed into the Battlefield 2 areas at the moment. However, let me dive in a little and see where this goes.
THN is very much a community, in that often all that draws us together is a mutual interest in playing games. THN has seen different games come and go. With the games some people come and go as their interest was with that game. Yet others stay around, despite the dwindling interest in the game that brought them here. This has happened with Natural Selection (though one might argue that NS hasn't quite left, as yet) and, eventually, it will happen with Battlefield 2.
Ongoing are an ever changing landscape of other games that we find interesting, whatever they may be, along with a general chatter that brings us closer together. It is this background layer that defines our community, not the game that is in prime ascendancy at the time. THN was here before the game and THN will be here after it has gone into decline.
In a general sense, I feel this is all that is required for community -- coming together in a common interest. Online communities are not destined to become macro-socio-entities, by which I mean that it is not a necessary function for a online community to expand ad-infinitum, where this
is a fundamental requirement in the real world because of the nature of resource distribution / allocation / acquisition. Effectively, our resources are near infinite, online. This is aided by the fact that, as a community, we only ever provide a social network of emotional and mental support -- we never need to provide for the physical bodies that real world communities must cater for.
So, drawing parallels with real world communities I feel to be fruitless. Our constraints are both less and different and our nature shares no fundamental baseline. As an online community, we are free to come together and develop, or not, as we see fit. Impact to real world communities: near sum zero. Impact to the individuals who are involved: substantial, sometimes even profound.
Under my definition (inevitably), THN is very much a community -- an
online community.
Within our community we undertake various activities. Those activities are governed by individuals or groups of individuals. Some of these things are spontaneous and expected to have a relatively short life, such as the proposed Starcraft event (not saying it's doomed, just saying it's not yet got the legs to be anything big). Others are ongoing, such as Battlefield 2 or Alien Swarm. Battlefield 2 is easily our flagship game, at the moment, but Alien Swarm has consistently run for much longer and has its own dedicated participants.
All these participants in these activites are welcome to partake of our wider community, but that is not a requirement. The THN community is here as a base to support our continued "survival" as a group over the Internet, from which we can create and feed new activities that interest us.
The management of individual activities is separate to the management of the community. Activities may have rules over and above those of the community, including entry or participation requirements. This is for those responsible for each activity to state in plain terms and to them to devise and implement. Many of our activities are open for all, usually on a first-come-first-served basis.
This is not to say that the activities are fundamentally different to the community, nor that the management of each part has no relation to the other, but that activities comprise of a subset of our community and, sometimes, include people who are only very loosely "community members". Indeed, an activity that was unrelated to THN, or adverse to the health of the community of THN, would probably be asked to be move on -- we are a community first and foremost. Those responsible for the community side of THN provide occasional guidance for the activities' management, and the activities inform the community of what is going on and where people can get involved.
Still, for our community to survive and even thrive we need a shared baseline, and this baseline is found largely in our activities and partly in our banter. I see our continued survival over the past three years, and I see our boom and slump between major activities.
Our latest incarnation, as exemplified in this board, is an attempt to allow any one area to boom without this being at the expense of the wider community -- the overbearing prevalence of Battlefield 2 lead to a slump in our other activities. Now these things can be managed and viewed according to an individual user's interests (via membership, or its lack, to usergroups). Don't like Natural Selection? No problem. Want to get involved again? No problem. Just join or leave the group as you see fit.
Battlefield 2 for THN has three major facets, from my point of observation: the clan, the community, and community activities driven by the clan. Examples, respectively, might be an ED Clan Match, a friendly meet-up on a server, and our THN Mini-League matches. In the first and last examples, these are organised by the Battlefield 2 Clan Admins. In the middle one, where it is just about community (i.e. getting together, playing some games, having some fun... the basis of all our ad-hoc activities) it is up to the self-declared organiser to get people together and make it happen. In that sense, any community member is both a participant and an organiser at any time, but when an activity is already being organised it is up to those who are already undertaking that to carry it on (or delegate it, if needed) -- after all, those organisers have often committed many weeks and months to building an activity to the point it has reached and they deserve a high degree of control over their creation.
So, we're a complex beast. At once we have this concept of community interacting with both ad-hoc/spontaneous and scheduled/organised activities. It is through cooperation and mutual respect that we arrive at decisions of what we do next. If Battlefield 2 tried to lay claim to all days of the week and demanded that everyone play or leave the boards then they'd be slapped down... but that'd lack mutual respect and as an underpinning principle that the BF2 Admin Team already adhere to I really don't see that happening.
But we do have a community, and it's alive and well. Sufficiently so that over three quarters of our members visit this board every single day.
Just remember: you can opt in and opt out of whatever activities you like, and you can even choose to opt out of them all, and yet
still you can be part of the THN community, and doubly so as we start to grow the THN Network into the Comedy and Tech sites that are just fledgling beasts at the moment.
