The Historian

I cannot describe how I’ve felt these past few months as I’ve continued to look for work. Sure I had a job, when many can’t find one. I liked where I worked and the people I worked with. And yes the ending of a nearly 2 year relationship in the middle of all that didn’t help. But I still felt like something else was missing from me.

Enter the new job. On Monday, I start working with BioWare working with the Community around Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The world just seems so different today and has for the past week as I’ve been slowing moving towards my first day. I feel amazing.

I get to work with BioWare… BIOWARE!

I get to work on a Star Wars game… STAR WARS!

And I once again get to be a part of a fanatical, fantastic and fascinating community.

I’m Alive… So Alive…

My first few weeks at Acclaim were mostly meetings around the launch of 2Moons. Daily conference calls with the CEO and the Marketing Manager. These meetings covered everything from the pricing of the cash shop items to finding voice talent to rework the in-game audio. The game had been rewritten specifically to bring in a more adult feel. They specifically modeled the dialog and in-game text after the then popular HBO series “Deadwood”. It was riddled with so much profanity that the gamers actually pushed back and wanted it to be softened. A great deal of the original text is still there but has been softened and filtered with standard comic book profanity. No %#@!.

Externally, I was already pretty integrated with the 2Moons community and I started to reach out to the moderators in the other games. Most were pretty accepting and I did my best to try and keep things as they were, not making many changes to the rules or how they ran things.

With 9 communities to manage there was really no way for me to do it all myself so I began to structure them in a hierarchy that consisted of a “Lead” or “Head” that reported to me, a “Second” or “Assistant” that reported to the Lead and filled in when they could not be available and a team of moderators for them. I tried to give them enough autonomy to select moderators themselves but always attempted to checkout anyone they wished to bring on. On a few occasions I would add those who I felt would benefit the community, but tried to respect the wishes of the Lead Moderators.

I did have a particularly hard time with one community; one that I never really got control over. It was based around a game that appealed to a young male, “tween” demographic and the moderators of the community were quite young as well. They greatly resented me coming into the community and setting down rules that were a little more stringent than they were used to. Though I didn’t remove any of the moderators they were all younger than the base limit I wanted set of sixteen years old. For the most part I left them this community alone, only entering it when things got out of hand. This unfortunately gave them the impression that I was only an enforcer and bit of a tyrant. I think that if I had just stepped in and set a new team in place the initial disruption to the community would have saved me a fair bit of grief in the long run.

In order to tell my tale at Acclaim I need to take you back, all the way back to 1998. It was that year that a few things came together for me but most importantly it is the year that I started my second fan site. My first was for a game called Creatures; the second was for a game to be made by a newly founded game company funded by Microsoft. That game was Dungeon Siege, created by Chris Taylor at his new Gas Powered Games studio.

That site was called “The Dungeon Siege Historian”. It wasn’t the first fan site for DS, one started a week before mine, but it didn’t last… Mine did. That site grew and was picked up by GameSpy as a hosted site under Planet RPG. We then merged with another fan site out there and eventually grew to become Planet Dungeon Siege. This site is still up and running 12 years later and with Dungeon Siege 3 in the works looks like it will be around for quite some time. But in 2007 after DS2 I was getting a little bored with the site and the franchise and was looking around for something new to play in the MMO space. I was a huge fan of Asheron’s Call, a game that I still think is one of the best MMOs of all time, and was looking for another fantasy based game to fill my time. As I searched around I found that the Acclaim brand had been resurrected and was putting out Asian MMOs in the US. One of the games coming was 2Moons, an adaptation of the Korean Dekaron. I loved the over the top style of the game and decided to join the community and see what it was about.

At the time there was much of a moderation team, in fact I think there might have only been one who worked for Acclaim. So I decided to offer my help, using my experience with PDS as proof of my competency. I contacted David Perry, who directed me to David Jun in Acclaim’s Marketing. He brought me onboard as one of the first volunteer moderators for 2Moons, with 2 other people. One really never made an effort and the other worked out well for some time, but eventually was let go.

I continued to grow the team adding those that I thought really helped the community. I will eventually write about some of them but for now I will only mention Jill Sullivan. Jill was my “wonder twin”… Between the two of us we could do just about any project Acclaim threw at us, in record time and above expectations. It was her video creation for 2Moons that led to David Perry hiring her to work for him, and her encouragement with him and Howard Marks that helped Acclaim hire me. I cannot ever thank her enough for that. She is currently looking for work in the Gaming Industry and I would highly recommend her to any company.

And that brings us right up to the point of me being hired at Acclaim.

Next up, my first few weeks at Acclaim and the challenges of taking on Communities that really didn’t want me there.

Now that Acclaim really is gone, absorbed by Playdom into the behemoth that is Disney, many people have asked that I write about my time there.

And so I shall…

I first want to say that what I will write is my personal thoughts and opinions as told from my perspective as a employee that worked 2800 miles away from everyone else. This means that I wasn’t always privy to everything that was going on with Acclaim. In fact I was just as surprised as everyone else when it was acquired by Playdom. It will also have a great deal to do with Community Management and my thoughts and processes as I entered and began to grow the Acclaim Community.

Over the next week or so I will begin to tell the story of “My Acclaim”.

At a young and impressionable age, I was introduced to the concept of “learning styles”. Specifically David Kolb’s learning styles model and experiential learning theory. My first contact with it was in the summer of 1989, a few years after the publication of his ‘Experiential Learning: Experience As The Source Of Learning And Development’. I won’t go into a lot of detail about it as there are other resources online that cover it. (Kolb Learning Styles)

This past week I’ve been able to receive the research of Charles Lieble, who along with C. Jay Hertzog researched the use of learning styles in the teaching of Geography. It was Charles Lieble that first introduced me to these concepts.

The reason I called this post “Full Circle” is that I have used the concepts of “Learning Styles” in my philosophies on Community Management. Because not everyone assimilates information in the same way, it is important that when presenting things to communities that you address the way that everyone captures and retains information.

Over the next few months I will now be able to show how the use of learning styles can greatly increase the growth of Online Communities as well as facilitate the rapid spread and uptake of information around your products.