Spotlight Adventures

This is a place holder for the PTA actual play post that I owe, plus a link to this discussion about my game.

The Looming Attention Crisis

Speaking of virtual societies and forums, here is an interesting claim that we are saturating ourselves with on-line feeds, which leads to poverty of attention and forces us to dump old feeds for new. Here robotnik writes that the gaming blogoshpere is like zillion of ego-based islands, and more surfacing every day. Like him, I'd love keeping tabs on all the things that are going on - but simply can't.

It was with that thought that I wandered why open this blog to begin with. The world doesn't need another theory blog, I thought; if I have an idea, I can always post it to some forum. The problem was, however, that in the Archipelago of ego-islands, our natives speak a different tongue. It is a most disturbing thing: there are amazing ideas floating around the dozen or so really talented people I know that write in the phorums, and there are amazing things going on in the indie scene for years, but like VC writes, we have only so much RAM - and my friends' times goes towards playing, reading and writing in Hebrew.

What was needed, I thought, was not another blog, but an aggregator of sorts, a very specific one. A blog that would collect what's going on a series of small, Hebrew-speaking islands, and likewise serve to bring ideas from the Indie scene over to the Hebrew phorums and people. Even if not as successful as I hope it to be, it would at least serve to be interesting.

Social groups and what to do now

Once again, I'm exchanging pleasantries with the ugly beast on the Orc forum, once more a forum-member asks: "are we driving everyone away?" (notice the corollaries between the two trees?), once again I ask "where are the 300 people who are enjoying BIGOR and we aren't they posting in the forum?", once again I am bummed by the sharp contrast by those, I believe, the understand the passion and good-will I bring to my volunteering, and those that view me as Lior does.

Karmi got me thinking about Internet and virtual communities again, which led to reading a short article about "bridging" and "bonding" group, that ask if they exist online. In short, a bridging group is one that helps bring together and connect between people from different social and socioeconomic backgrounds: for example, volunteer groups (like MDA) or the IDF. It serves to widen the person's relationships. A bonding group is one that deepens the relationship between people of similar backgrounds and interests: for example, the local cell of a political party, or a religious school.

The question the researcher asked was whether the internet serves as a better platform for bonding groups or bridging groups. On the one hand, he theorizes, people can easily find people with their own interests and backgrounds – they can search between virtually millions of sites, forums, discussion groups, blogs, and so on to find the group that best matches their preferences. Since it is virtually costless to enter and exit a social group, people can avoid confrontation by simply leaving a group that doesn't suit them. On the other hand, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog" – you can be anyone online, and geographic and physical constraints don't interfere with you joining a group. The internet serves as quick and cheap communication between people from all over, and can gap social and economic divides that usually prevent people from meeting.

Not surprisingly, the researcher found both groups are richly represented on the internet. He divided the groups into several categories, and ours, that falls into the category of a hobby group, he found to represent a 50:50 ratio – that means that of the people surveyed for the paper, about half joined hobby groups that served as bridging groups, and about half joined bonding hobby groups. Some use the internet to deepen their relationship with people sharing their hobby, and some use it to widen their acquaintances with other hobbyists.

The two groups not only serve different functions, but also send out different signals to outsiders: bridging groups tend to send positive, inclusive signals. Bonding groups, on the other hand, sometimes send negative, exclusive signals: they tell the exterior world: "unless you're like this, precisely like this, please don't come near us", and actively strive to expel those that don't match that ideal. This is natural, since in order to be a bonding group, the group has to be homogenous, and that's how the group manufactures that homogeneity. Those excluded, expelled, or even mere viewers who disagree with these negative signals might object to them, or find them offensive. Which brings me back to Doron's question: are we driving people away?
Our hobby is hopelessly divided into dozens if not hundreds of little groups. I'm not talking about on-line groups, but "similar-interest groups", who have a chance of becoming bonding groups: young players and old players, live and table-top, freeform and system, D&D and indie games, and so on and so forth. Since the numbers aren't that big, most don't have the chance to become real boding groups because the distances are too big and the chances or meeting are too small. The Fellowship is a good, but rare, example, of such a bonging group. The bridging groups are those that have an interest in appealing to as many people as possible: commercial stores, roleplaying after-school activities, and gaming conventions.

So what about the ISRA? The problem, I think, is in the contradiction. On the one hand, we are clearly trying to be a bridging group: our very motto is as inclusive as possible. Some of our activities, most notably BIGOR and ICON, managed to be inclusive (to a limited extent). Others, like our community forum, and some would say the Fifth Facet, are exclusive. I think, after reading the article, that it is not an unfortunate accident, but intentional.

Our intention is to have fun with what we do: gaming, talking on the forum, reading the Facet. The forum isn't meant to be a big billboard, with notices about upcoming events and people looking for games, but a place for people in "the community" to come together. But for that to happen, that community has to exclude people from it. I don't believe it is possible to have the sort of relationships, the sort of fun, we're looking for, that we're used to from our own small gaming parties, without limiting the group to people similar to us: in disposition, in other hobbies, in gaming preferences, even in age and status. I suggest that we're looking to create a close-knit group, and that by definition, that means sending out negative signals to others: act like this, or stay away. I further suggest that it is contradictory to the ISRA proclaimed intention of being an umbrella-organization for all Israeli roleplayers, for bringing together as many people as possible, and promote the hobby everywhere. I think that as long as we force the two intentions to live under the same roof (for example, for aspiring to organize events only with our friends, or by hosting our community forum on the ISRA website), we're forcing the contradiction, and one would constantly interfere with the other.

To answer one of my earlier questions: where are the 300 hundreds? They are in their homes, and with their friends, or visiting their own blogs and private forums. In short, they have their own bonding groups. Those few large, open forums, are just bigger bonding groups which they aren't members of. They have no reason to frequent our forum, or the forums where we're having these arguments and sending those negative signals, because aside from purely technical and practical reasons around a large convention, they have no use for them, and better places to be. Ours is the only forum that attempts that contradiction: to be both an inclusive and an exclusive forum; to provide help and information, but also to be communal and fun. It seems, at times, both sides feel cheats: those say "you claim ISRA is for everyone, but have your own private jokes and you're making fun of other people", and those say "we can't have fun in our own forum, so we'll go have fun elsewhere". I don't think this contradiction has a solution other then separating the two functions.

I don't think I could rally much support around these claims. There are a lot of opposing factors: the small numbers make it very difficult for sustaining bonding groups for a lengthy period of time; the first Geek Social Fallacy; the tradition of the ISRA and its origin from a very small bonding group but with high bridging expectations; and the thought, expressed by some (like myself) that it is too late to change the way other people, other bonding groups, view the ISRA. So we are doomed, for now, to find ourselves again and again in these situations. Until, eventually, I snap and kill somebody. Then things might change.