Discussion Spaces- Circles

Over the last few years, I’ve been less and less interested in the types of dialogue produced by forums and the blogosphere.

The problem isn’t just the need for filtering, there’s also the major issue of attention posting, status games, and the simple but also real issues of signal to noise, produced in part by numbers of people and by the need to constantly educate folks to get up to a minimum standard.

At the same time, having a group discussion to bounce ideas off of is useful. So I’m toying with a different setup for online discussion that maybe some folks will find useful.

1. Small group (12 members, 6 men max, 6 women max)

Enough people for multiple ideas, and enough people assuming that not everyone will participate or care about any given topic. This is based on seeing most functional forum threads, or blog posts discussions, usually revolve around 4-8 people.

2. Private, but quotable w/permission

The discussion is private to the group, though anyone can talk about their own thoughts publicly, or quote others with permission.

Keeping it out of the public eye cuts out a lot of the attention posting, plus it also allows people to start doing a lot of the exploratory/unfinished thoughts stuff that tends to get pushed aside on the public spaces.

3. Limited Duration, forced mixing

If you form this kind of group, it needs to have a deadline, an endpoint. My suggestion is something like 3-6 months. After which, the group breaks and if you choose to form a new group, at least half the people must be new people. (And, it might make sense to form multiple groups, if you have specific topics).

The deadline does two things- one, it pushes folks to try to make the most out of the time people have committed to being available- if I have access to 5 really smart folks who really know the topic, and there’s a good gestalt, I better use it! Second, it stops the other major problem that shows up a lot- the formation of identity around spaces- “We’re Forgies” “We’re Storygamers” (or, equally problematic, “They’re Forgies”, “They’re Storygamers”).

The point of the group is the function of what it produces, not just having a new set of buddies (and if you are buddies, you don’t need to be in an online group just to maintain that friendship…)

At the end of the duration, it makes sense to have a followup on how things shook out, and what, if any valuable ideas folks got from it.

Blood & Ink: Harpies

Concept:
Warrior-philosophers, halfway between classic Harpies and Tengu. Mystically inclined- daughters of the ashes of the Phoenix, both aligned to air and fire.

Description:

With the death and rebirth of the Phoenix, burning hot embers the size of giant melons are left behind. Collected, cared for, and carefully sung over, they hatch to produce the proud race of the Hakorrah, in common parlance known as the Harpies, whom Summoners have called upon for the knowledge of the skies, stars, and faraway lands.

They hear the first cries of the Phoenix as ember-eggs, and it is the Words of Creation they part-remember, and it is this, that makes up their “Terrifying Screech” ability- a fragmented spark of divine language that stuns their prey, and is what they consider to be a piece of the Great Poem of Creation.

Filtering Spaces

For any internet discussion space, there is a spectrum. On one end sits the most awesome, creative, intelligent space beyond your imagination, on the other end lies an endless page of spam porn and Timecube Birther rants in an unholy Esparanto of Zalgo and lolspeak. The second law of Internet thermodynamics states that all discussion spaces are headed toward the latter end unless active measures are taken.

So, filtering.

As stated before with Designing Spaces for Design Discussions, it takes work to make sure you get the good side and not the bad side of the spectrum.

Places like the Angry Black Woman blog has both a set of rules for discussion and a required reading list. This is really important if you’re running a forum or otherwise expect to encounter a lot of newcomers that you -want- to bring up to speed.

Generally, I’ve found, though, that people who just want to troll don’t care about whatever good-faith rules or requirements you put up, and, at best, simply use them to better camoflage their way into acting as concern trolls.

For the most part, public rules work better as education tools for good faith participants and to establish a chain of policy for banning/moderating, which is excellent in forums or spaces where more than one person has to share authority about moderating space.

The way I filter here, though, is actually more advanced.

There’s three things I’ve found common in people capable of good faith discussions- a willingness to self educate, not assuming authority irregardless of being uninformed on the topic at hand, and a lack of aggressive (“defensive”) posturing. Having these 3 qualities are necessary for meaningful discussion which is not locked into privilege based blinders.

I usually only let a few comments through which violate those principles, in order to show -how not to behave-, which you can find in a few other posts in the past. Long-time readers pick up on this, though trolls and folks who are more focused on speaking their own rather than dialoguing never do, probably because they’re not really reading. (Again, it’s a filtering tool).

Part of what makes this very effective is that most people imagine the only purpose of online discussion is to make oneself popular and well-liked (even if all you do is toss out hateful rants)- so the idea of disregarding large portions of the internet populace as irrelevant to discussion, even unto being an asshole and ruining your “online cred” (OH NOES!), it’s completely beyond them.

People who can grasp the point of the discussion space operate just fine, people who can’t show themselves out very quickly. Though this is less of a group discussion space, it works as a teaching space in it’s own way.

Whatever way you go, filtering is all about keeping true to the purpose of your space and who you serve. Filtering is the way to make sure it stays that way.

Fantasy Armor!

Only in a world of magic could you make this really work, but it looks awesome:

The Stories We Want to See

There’s a particular understanding when you consider media in context of the greater culture: all stories hold ideas, themes and values, and most of the stories tend to come from a similar set, and a fair amount may not be what you want in your stories.

And so, roleplaying. Here, you and your friends can make stories together, stories with the stuff you want and none of the stuff you don’t want.

I had a conversation a few years back with Liam Burke when he mentioned that the reason there’s so much creative tension in roleplaying is that you’re working in a group to create a story and you’re trusting each other not to fuck it up.

Which makes a lot of sense, at the same time, I also realize roleplayers who are looking to create particular kinds of stories a) usually can’t articulate what it is they’re looking for, b) aren’t very good at forming play groups to do that – half of the “problem player” advice deals on a larger issue of creative agenda, but I’d say the other half is probably really poor advice on how to try to club someone into trying to tell the kind of story you want to see.

Ben is having a discussion/musing about what is the audience we want to design for, and in many ways, I feel that it’s also the same people we want to play with, and by that extension, probably the people interested in the same kinds of stories we’re interested in as well.

Which also says a lot about you, depending on the stories you want, the people want and don’t want to play with, whether you even consider the themes you create, or if there’s space to do that in the first place.

To flip the question I keep coming back to – it’s not “Why should we care about THOSE people?”, it’s “What kind of person are you that you get to matter more than anyone else?”

Ben’s disquiet is something I think many have and will continue to come back to, at least until we build greater networks or even entire scenes of gamers who are interested in considering the larger social issues as part of our design as well- as much as we decided to stop playing games we didn’t like or to keep playing with people we didn’t want to play with, this is the next step.

I know what kind of stories I want to see, I know who I want to play with. After all, roleplaying is a group activity. If all I wanted to hear was one voice, I’d go write fiction. If all I wanted was the same old stories, I’d just stick with mainstream movies and books.

Thankfully, despite the opposition, the creative spark and passion for geekery lives on.