A leaderless community

A story about a tree is a reading that resonated with me as well as raised questions. It talks about the impact of a player that passed away but still has a presence in Ultima Online - a presence of enough strength that a person that never met her records her story. There is something that can be said about shared history of an online community. More than recording the history of a player, Designer Dragon constructs through his account a means to legitimize the experience of sorrow as a group. He defines it as a "real" experience and dares anyone else to challenge his interpretation of history.

As this happening has been iconized and becomes part of the community history, I wonder about how much community existed when Karyn was actively playing. I question this because of an experience in my online community where our very dynamic guild leader disappeared.

Our leader and her family were victims of mistaken identity by a group of drug dealers who were dyslexic and got the wrong house. Instead of shaking up and/or terminating the guys who owned them money down the street these hoodlums found themselves in the wrong house unsure what to do. She and her family were tied up and their house ransacked - fortunately her son got a call into the police before they discovered him and so they were rescued without sustaining personal injury. They picked up everything and moved into a hotel while they searched for a new house. However she was without a computer for the first while and basically disappeared.

Instead of the group slowly dissolving and losing focus another member of council almost immediately posted what happened to our beloved leader. People took up the slack and filled in doing things that normally she would do so the community would continue as normally as possible. It took a number of people to fill her shoes and they did an amazing job for almost six weeks during the summer when she wasn't able to look after us herself. Our community is more than just an online community that functions as an aspect of the game. Most of us know at least one other player personally because they are a RL friend. A number of us have met other guildies in RL when they had the chance. Many of us have MSN or AIM user names of other group members, and some of us have shared phone numbers. We have a MSN website where we share pictures and could still get to each other if Neopets went poof.

All this to say, our guild could have fell apart without our leader but it didn't. I think it is due the fact that we are a community rather than just an online group with hazy membership boundaries. Perhaps membership is a key to what makes a community rather than a transitory group of convenience.