A community?

“A community is a multigenerational group of people, at work or play, whose identities are defined in large part by the roles they play and relationships they share in that group activity. The community derives its cohesion from the joint construction of a culture of daily life built upon behavioral norms, routines, and rules, and from a sense of shared purpose” (Barab et al. 18).

How does the community that I’m looking at fit this definition of a community? AGW is multigenerational – we have grandmothers and grandfathers, parents of teens, women that are pregnant, and those of us still dating around looking for love. Since Neopets is site for entertainment we are a community of play in large part but many of us take is quasi-seriously. People develop goals as far as what they are trying to accomplish in a day, week or year.

AGW community members often feel the need to get involved in the community to provide a service to its members. People carve out a standing for themselves by how often they are around, and what they do for the community. For example one member runs a game that is like Bingo and does a weekly treasure hunt. A few others work together to create new guild layouts and develop user lookups for interested guild members. Another member runs a game where the objective is to make the highest or lowest unique bid (1-100). Still another member is developing a team of pets that will fight in the battledome. Someone else posts the crossword answers on a daily basis. Personally I have become the advisor for the guild on the stock market and I am working on doing the web design for the battledome group (because the leader doesn’t know html). Being involved gives a sense of purpose in the group and identity. It seems like everyone finds a nitch for themselves if they want to be a central member of the community. People who are peripheral participants often get involved sooner or later, and sometimes those in the thick of things step away from such an active role. (Very recently council was reorganized to reflect who was actively leading. Those who had become busy in RL and couldn’t do as much stepped aside without anyone getting upset or any upheaval occurring in the group.)

There are definitely group norms that are at work in AGW. One example of a norm is the helpfulness of the group and expected behavior. For example while playing you might get a quest. The fire faerie will come to you and say something like “Where is my jingly bell?” and you are expected to find that object for them for a reward. The catch- you have no access to the shop wizard that you would usually use to find objects. If you try she tells you it is cheating. When I first joined AGW and I got such a quest I posted to the board asking for someone else to look it up for me. Instead people started giving me the object I had requested. The norm is someone posts a quest item, and other members will rush to find it for them. (It is almost like a race to get the object to them first.) The member with the quest will turn in the item to the faerie, find out the reward and copy the award notice to the guild board along with a thank you to the member who sent the object. The first time I got 2 of the same object I didn’t know what to do. Do you send one back? Keep it and send a gift? Thank both and and keep both? Common convention is to thank the first (giving a gift isn’t expected) and then thank subsequent givers and send them back. If you don’t know to post the your results you will get flooded with jingly bells. If you don’t send back extra ones you are considered sort of rude, although no one will say anything. And people will often give you expensive things that you need (at over 10K sometimes less wealthy players will post prices rather than give the item, which is acceptable). The reason for the great rush to give is because this system only works effectively if everyone takes responsibility for the good of each individual member. Getting expensive gifts compels you to also be generous because otherwise you feel as though you aren’t doing your part in the community. I have easily gotten 250K worth of stuff from my guild in the past year (this is not counting the stuff that were presents that were given to me by individuals that I didn’t request). This is only possible because all of us give liberally.