Practicum 7 - Wrapping Things Up

I figured I would use this final practicum post to kind of summarize some of the experiences I had on Kongregate.  Over the course of the semester, I participated in various parts of the Kongregate forums, as well as some attempts to interact with the Kongregate chat rooms.  On the forums, I posted just under 300 posts over the course of the semester (20-25 a week).  I also spent time on the chat rooms, although I had almost no success in making networks with the chat rooms.

On the forums, it took a solid month of posts before I was acknowledged with any amount of seriousness.  The Kongregate community niches, at least the few that I participated in, seemed to be resistant to new comers.  But, through persistence, I was able to carve out my spot and my answers began to fit in the persona that the other users came to expect.  This is the first time I spend a continued amount of time on one forum (usually a bounce around 5-8 different ones without ever being a regular contributor).  I hadn't expected to have to put in so much time to gain acceptance into the community.

I would imagine part of the community's hesitance comes from two main reasons.  First, the community as a whole seems to be pretty young, probably 13-17 for the most part.  I would imagine that the people who were posting in 'Serious Discussion' where I spent most of my time would be hesitant to take somebody who had a grand total of zero posts before I started this project seriously right away.  Second, many people on the forums seem to, at the very least, try to troll.  There are a ridiculous amount of troll alts on this site among the forums, I would imagine when people saw me roll in, that they thought I was just another troll alt.

In short, I was only really able to make a real connection with one other person on the forums.  Generally when posting I tried to be confrontational which didn't foster many friendly connections among the other members.  But, it was interesting to see some of the theories that Danny discussed in lecture play out within the Kongregate community.

Practicum 6 - The Cliques of Kongregate

Over the past couple of weeks, I tried to diversify my Kongregate experience by engaging in some of the more casual social areas of the site.  I choose two different parts and encountered similar difficulties.

The first was their chat rooms.  As I've mentioned, they are terribly designed.  None of the chatrooms are for a specific interest that can bring people together (such as a chatroom for people who want to talk about movies).  Another problem is that, while there are probably over 200 English speaking chatrooms, most of them have very little, if any, chatter going on in them.  After much searching, I found three different chatrooms that had some conversations going on.  In each of the three, it seemed like there was a small group of regulars who were doing the talking.  Anytime I tried jumping in with something to say, my comments were basically ignored.  It's seems to be difficult for new people to join in the chat communities if they are all as closed off as the few that I interacted with.

I then tried to contribute to the Off Topic forums.  The problem here is that no real conversations or communities are ever really cultivated.  Also, so many different people make new threads on what seems to be an hourly basis, that threads routinely get shoveled to the the 3rd or 4th page of the forum.  Also, this particular part of the forums is rampant with trolls, so anytime a topic that I'm interested in at the OT forums emerges, it either cycles to the bottom or is trolled to oblivion.  Overall, the past two weeks have been a fruitless venture for me in terms of the more casual social elements of Kongregate.

Practicum 5 - Wikipedia Post

While trying (and so far being unsuccessful) at making contacts in the more social regions of Kongregate, I took some time to contribute to their Wikipedia page.  I have never contributed to a Wikipedia page in a way that was meant to be a real contribution.  When I first visited Kongregate's Wikipedia page, I was taken aback by how short and simple it was based on the amount of traffic that I am assuming it generates on a daily or monthly basis.

Because I have never had much experience editing on Wikipedia and not knowing the proper community standards, I did a really limited posting.  My contribution was the second paragraph under "Developers Community."  I also tried to keep it limited because I was concerned that maybe my post would be deleted (my history of fake posts always got deleted immediately).  I did a bit of research on their developer page and added a brief bit that seemed to be a relatively recent update that was not represented on the Wikipedia page.  It also seems like that this page receives attention pretty sporadically since there are a bunch of sources from either 2007 or 2011.

Media Social Networking - Post 4

It's been quite awhile since I've posted about my practicum - really since I presented.  Most of what I've done on Kongregate has been in the Serious Discussion portion of the forum.  I've started contributing to the more casually social aspects of the site, from their terribly designed chat rooms to the off topic and general chatter forums.  But, thus far at least, I've found it difficult to get into any real thoughtful conversations.  I'm hoping I can have a couple of notable experiences in the more casual conversation threads by the end of the semester.

When I first started posting on the Serious Discussion, people generally just assumed I was a troll.  After all, I had never posted on the forums before, and troll alts are relatively common, especially when someone receives a temporary ban from the forums.  One person asked me, since I'd had an account on the site for about three years, why I hadn't posted at all.  This suggested to me immediately that this particular thread was generally closed-off to new-comers.  I would guess this has arised from a history of trolls and the like.

Once I began to post a little while, I finally connected with one person.  We agreed on one particular thread and began to talk via private messages about the issue we agreed about.  Eventually, we began to talk about more social stuff and write to each other every now and then which was exciting.  Unfortunantly, this is the only person that I've really made a connection with so far - most people who are regulars on this particular thread largely seem to stick to themselves.

Generally when I've been posting on this section of the forums, I've found myself getting into many fiery arguments with people.  I think for the last bit of the semester, I'm going to try to remain more unemotional and see how my interactions with the people on the forums differs with more laid-back style on the forums.

Media Social Networking - Post 3 - Prelude to a Group Project

Over the past three weeks or so, I have been engaging with the Kongregate community.  Through this time, I have noticed several distinct traits emerge.  For starters, there seems to be a conscious attempt among the community members to be helpful to fellow developers and to have legitimate conversations with other members.  Any attempt to troll or flame members is either ignored or reported and quickly removed by a forum mod.  In fact, these discussion boards are some of the most proactive in terms of removing content that is detrimental to the positive/thoughtful discussion that happens the bulk of the time on the website.

Within Kongregate, there is such a broad community aspect that users almost have to create their own niche within the website in order to really enjoy the experience.  Most people simply do not have enough hours in the day to contribute to the discussion revolving around coding and aiding aspiring game developers, as well as, contributing to the chatrooms and to the regular discussion boards.  Because Kongregate is so masssive, the sheer amount of categories the website had placed within its community seems to be a subtle attempt to say, "Don't worry about doing a little of a lot of things - do a lot on a few things."

While I'll touch on both of these aspects when presenting today, in terms of the discussion question, there is something else that I think is important to think about.  On Kongregate, the individual identity of people is rarely, if ever, discussed.  The profiles of users is limited - Kongregate keeps it bare bones, seeming to emphasize the content and not necessarily who the creator is.  This leads me to my question: do you prefer a community situation where you know who other people are and they know you (Facebook, Twitter) or do you prefer to participate in a more annonymous setting (YouTube, Kongregate, etc.)?

Media Social Networking - Post 2

I have begun getting involved within the Kongregate community.  The first thing I've noticed as I started to browse the community aspect of the site was just how massive it is.  Kongregate has, really, three different community options for people to get involved in.  There is a developers' site, with feedback for people on their coding, on game ideas, on places to go for potential funding for new games, etc.  Within the developers' section is the ability to upload your game onto Kongregate and to receive a portion of the funding for each hit you get (I'm not entirely sure how much that actually amounts to).  There is then the main Kongregate forums which are entirely massive.  There are forum boards for the current 'hot' Kongregate games, for general video game chatter (these threads focus on console games, not PC/MMOs).  Finally, there are the forums used more for discussion, from discussion of current news events, to off-topic/lightheard discussions, to people posting art, poems, photography, and the like.

The first forum that I've began to investigate and try to take part in was the board titled "Forum Games."  These games are basically just an opportunity for people to Role Play (RP) depending on what the post's scenerio is.  There are Mafia games, there are adventure-themed RP discussions, and really anything in between.  I've been part of two games thus far, although my experiences thus far have been less than ideal.

My first experience in Forum Games was a Mafia type game.  The game only featured 8 players which is quite a bit smaller than most of the Mafia games on Kongregate seem to start with.  This was due, in part, to the Original Poster (OP) being especially eager to get the game underway.  This was his first attempt at running a Mafia on Kongregate which probably didn't help make the game go smoother.  The game ended really quickly (after two days), including forcing someone to role switch (myself) when the RNG after the first night messed up the competition of the remaining members.  As I mentioned, this was my first experience with the Forum Games, but the others seemed to understand all of the jargon/abbreviations.

My second experience with this part of Kongregate was an entire RP story.  This also hasn't gone terribly well either.  Most of the people seemed to have quickly lost interest with this thread.  I personally signed up for one of the lesser roles and never really experienced much of an opportunity to get involved in the story or keep the story going.  This is my first experience doing any real RPing of any kind.  There are some threads on this forum that have several hundred posts and I'm hoping to at least experience on of those over the course of the semester.  I am about to start another Mafia game on the forum.  If anything noteworthy occurs, I'll mention it via the Practicum, otherwise, I'll be posting about my experiences on other aspects of the Kongregate community.

Media Social Networking - Post 1

For my practicum (Media-Based Social Networking), I have decided to use Kongregate.com.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Kongregate, it is basically a site that collects the latest and greatest Flash games that the Internet has to offer and puts them under one site.  The site, to help encourage users to try out new games that they may not otherwise sample, they offer Badges (who doesn't want to collect shiny badges?), including a Badge of the Day that the most diehard Kongregate people can achieve daily.

When I initially was assigned Media Social Networking, I wasn't sure if I wanted to do Last.fm or Kongregate, so I spent a couple of days posting and interacting with both sites message boards and getting a feel for their communities.  My experience with Last.fm was a message board that was pretty quiet, with the only posts that were active were posts that wondered "What is your favorite band?" or "Make a comment about the above user's last played song."  These threads were often into the thousands in terms of replies and didn't seem to foster must of a discussion.

Kongregate's forums, on the other hand, are super active and have a wide variety of different categories to choose from, from Off Topic, to general gaming, to Serious Discussion.  While I have had an account on Kongregate since Sept. of 2009, I have never visited the forums until I was assigned the practicum (something that a poster even commented - but that will be mentioned in my next post).  During the practicum, I will be contributing/participating in the forums, and will try to contribute and read from several different forum groups on the site.