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ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR INTERNET.

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More personal interaction is mediated through the internet than ever.

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Have we committed our interpersonal culture to big commercial middlemen?

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No.

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Plenty of people use the internet to connect small groups of friends and like-thinkers.

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Some folks I know use the metaphor of the treehouse for these groups: the small private spaces where friends can gather and play.

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These self-contained groups are the internet’s dark matter, missing from a view of “social media” that prizes broadcast reach.

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But what makes treehouses so intimate? Why are they attractive to people looking to connect on the internet? Is it possible to make a better one?

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But what makes treehouses so intimate? Why are they attractive to people looking to connect on the internet? Is it possible to make a better one? How do treehouses work?

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Well, what tools are we talking about?

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IRC

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text MUDs

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Second Life

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multiplayer games

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There are others on the web, of course – Twitter watercooler cliques, LiveJournal communities, some subReddits – but these are representative real-time treehouses.

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What do we like about them?

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IRC is something of the minimum viable treehouse: people talking and not much else.

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Presence is ambient as people idle. It’s too simple to organize any way but flatly.

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People do play (usually role-play) on IRC.

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People use bots to provide some spatiality and game-ness – but people and their IRC clients still assume sequential chatting, so it’s not magic.

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Ultimately IRC isn’t very accessible. GUI services attract more plain folks, and integrate better with the rich media internet.

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MUDs are play-oriented at least. They have user- serviceable parts, and can grow new places as more people join.

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They’re not perfect games: social features like text paging are convenient, but break game-ness.

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Also the administrative metaphor is wrong.

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Admin privileges are attached to game characters. The game ends up run by the friends of whoever set up the server, not the hosts of the best parties. Administrative meta-game drama can’t be separated from the game itself.

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Without IRC’s ubiquity, MUDs are dying out as players choose graphical games.

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That’s a shame as text-based MUDs are more accessible for creating. You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. vs

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Players still make the deeper graphical games their own, whether through guilds or real multiplayer building.

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Minecraft is a clear darling, but my heart has a special spot for a different game: Animal Crossing.

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Animal Crossing puts you in a tiny village where you can interact with the town, its simulated citizens (who are animals) and other human players.

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The underlying rules of Animal Crossing comprise simple systems that reinforce the conceit of small town life.

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Much of the activity in your town happens outdoors, in a simple simulated biome that feeds your innate biophilia.

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The real-time clock gives your town an additional sense of place. Events happen, weather changes, holidays come and go even when the game is off.

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An apparent problem with the game is the materialist value system it can seem to have.

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But this is a misreading: though the monetary economy supports other aspects of the game, it’s in support of the other systems.

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Tom Armitage game designer Compare [Tiny Tower] to Animal Crossing, which, while framed with a structure of repetition – performing chores to pay off a mortgage – emphasizes the intrinsic rewards of doing so. ... Returning the next day will yield new fish, new plants, new conversation from villagers pleased to see you. The motivation isn’t to return as a timer runs out; the motivation to return is simply to see your friends again.

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The real problem with Animal Crossing is it doesn’t go far enough.

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It’s multiplayer… but not enough.

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You can personalize it… but not enough.

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The world persists as a place… but not enough.

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And the childish character design isn’t generic enough. It can be… creepy.

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No content

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No content

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No content

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Second Life is almost the best treehouse tool. At its worst, it shows how hard design is: its shortcomings are often really tradeoffs.

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The world is persistent, but persistence is intertwingled with operators’ predominant business model.

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It is fully buildable, but the difficulty of building means Sturgeon’s Law applies in spades: it is mostly badness.

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The world is immersive but bad building, incomplete control of the avatar, and voice chat annihilate any suspension of disbelief.

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Immersion is an additional problem in that the viewer application takes the sovereign posture.

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Alan Cooper author, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design A product’s posture is its behavioral stance – the way it presents itself to users. Posture is a way of talking about how much attention a user will devote to interacting with the product.

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Alan Cooper author, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design Programs that monopolize users’ attention for long periods of time are sovereign posture applications. A sovereign product dominates a user’s workflow as his primary tool.

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While you can idle all day in IRC or MUD spaces, Second Life acts like a real full-screen, immersive game. You can only have ambient presence there if you have attention to waste.

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It’s hard to integrate it with your existing social context when you’re either in Second Life or out of it.

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What properties do treehouses share?

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Place

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The simulation tools provide a space that can be built. The group is empowered to change the appearance of their social context.

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But even basic tools like IRC provide a sense that the group is limited, a context you put yourself in.

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A good community is somewhere you are.

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Transience

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The ephemerality of speech in these tools better affords intimacy. It’s safe to speak in a personal tone when your words aren’t public and published for the internet’s later reference.

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(This is a weak point of the asynchronous web services mentioned earlier. The web has a long memory.)

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That speech is temporal also means someone can be absent, which makes presence meaningful. Availabot Schulze & Webb, 2006 availabot.com

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Some services provide link sharing and quotes databases as forms of intransient group memory.

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But that contrasts with the bulk of conversation, which isn’t captured at all.

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Play

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Play spaces are sometimes called “magic circles”. Entering them is ritualized, and once inside, disbelief is suspended and only the game’s rules apply.

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Johan Huizinga Dutch historian and author, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play- Element in Culture (1938) The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple… all in form and function play-grounds… within which special rules obtain.

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All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” “

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If the tool simulates a world, it has to work in the least surprising way to keep from breaking you out of the bounds of play.

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Similarly, Richard Bartle describes the “physics” of MUD as helping players suspend disbelief by working the way the player would expect, wherever the rules could.

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Play is also about adopting a character.

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Cohesive community requires reputation built on strong identity, but identity in a “temporary world” of play is fluid. HELLO my name is

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Conversation is an iterated game, so your pseudo can be a strong identity even if it isn’t your public commercial web face. HELLO my name is

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Autonomy

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Treehouse groups are decentralized by default, run bottom-up on the “do-ocratic” principles of some hackerspaces.

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Don’t ask me what needs doing when there is so much to do.” “

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This is also like the principles of Open Space Technology for unconferences.

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No content

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Open Space also features the Law of Two Feet: If at any time you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet to go someplace else.

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Meanwhile we already have a model for a self-organized internet space.

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Meanwhile we already have a model for a self-organized internet space. It’s a wiki.

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Which goes to show that, like wikis need janitors, parties need hosts.

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Heather Champ former Flickr community manager I can’t think of any successful online community where the nice, quiet, reasonable voices defeat the loud, angry ones on their own.

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In practice, hosts are merely the first members of the group. They set the tone and create the mix of people through choosy inviting.

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Hosts use soft power to influence. The group still governs itself. (It’s a fine line, especially for us nerdy types susceptible to the Geek Social Fallacies.) ⃠

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So are these the necessary, atomic properties that create a treehouse style group?

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Not really.

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These properties correlate with the real thing these groups have in common: they’re private.

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Danny O’Brien internet guy In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. … On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering, is shattered.

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The properties we’ve discussed afford privacy, especially in contrast to public web pages.

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A private space is necessarily limited, creating a sense of place apart from other contexts.

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A private space is necessarily run bottom-up by the people involved, with no third-party interests.

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Play requires a delineated safe space for social experimentation.

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Recording is corrosive to candid sharing, so a private internet space must be transient.

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These properties support privacy, so a treehouse tool will provide them to some extent.

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In that way these properties describe those independent internet communities we might call treehouses.

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What will you do with them?

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Thanks for the photos: Jason B http://flic.kr/p/Anqfv Victor R. Ruiz http://flic.kr/p/7scw6h Martino Sabia http://flic.kr/p/4z218 Rene Rivers http://flic.kr/p/6b9iSQ dvanzuijlekom http://flic.kr/p/9PNSwU deargdoom57 http://flic.kr/p/586AFK Tom Martin http://flic.kr/p/ipNPL Dock Drumming http://flic.kr/p/2sjs5x joe fakih gomez http://flic.kr/p/ae4QCC mammal http://flic.kr/p/kDcy3 Josh Wedin http://flic.kr/p/akBYdJ Raftwet Jewell http://flic.kr/p/5Bp57J Anna Conti http://flic.kr/p/5UaQ5q Jeremy Brooks http://flic.kr/p/QeRN7 D’Arcy Norman http://flic.kr/p/2NdJ Argonne Nat’l Lab http://flic.kr/p/7t5UhK sgrace http://flic.kr/p/4j5YpX Thomas Wagner http://flic.kr/p/8D6x2d msspider66 http://flic.kr/p/3pcoZ Mary Bliss http://flic.kr/p/3PbLdA chrisinplymouth http://flic.kr/p/6LaqNq Helene Valvatne Andås http://flic.kr/p/8uTNHj Dani Lurie http://flic.kr/p/dHzzU Steve Rhodes http://flic.kr/p/4CxEnJ

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References • Tom Armitage, “The Game Design of Everyday Things: Everyday Gaming,” Kill Screen • Richard Bartle, “M.U.D.: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw’s Astonishing Contrivance,” GDC Vault (photo gamasutra.com) • Chris Colin, “Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com,” San Francisco Chronicle (Heather Champ photo by Serguei Mourachov) • Danny O’Brien, “The Register,” Oblomovka (photo by quinn norton)

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Mark Paschal markpasc.org/mark/ Thanks!