(2012-03-15) Paschal Online Community Treehouse

Mark Paschal on designing semi-private Virtual Community like a Tree House.

The "Dark Matter" of the Internet - vs broadcast Social Networking. (Semi-Social)

Examples: IRC, text MUD/MOO, Second Life, multi-player Computer Games (MineCraft, Animal Crossing), sub-ReddIts...

Without IRC's ubiquity, MUDs are dying out as people choose graphical games... That's a shame as text-based MUDs are more accessible for creating.

The real problem with Animal Crossing is that it doesn't go far enough. It's multi-player, but not enough.

Second Life is almost the best TreeHouse tool. At its worst, it shows how hard design is: it's shortcomings are really trade-offs.

• Immersion is an additional problem because the viewer application takes the sovereign posture.

A Framing/goal: Generative Game Playing/World Building.

Need to allow incremental/ambient presence to let members be semi-present without taking over their time.

Properties: Sense of Place for Context; Transcience (non-permanence) or speech (perhaps some limited permanent record); Play (Suspension Of Disbelief, Performance Art); fluid identity (consistent in-world, not necessarily consistent with "outside" identity), Bottom-Up organization.

• Meanwhile, we already have a model for a Self Organized internet space: Wiki.
  • Like wikis need janitors, parties need hosts. (Super Users using Soft Power)
• Are these properties necessary? Not really. They correlate with the real thing these groups have in common: Privacy.