This week we had to create a participation observation report about a community that aligns with our aspirations, this can be found below.
Participation Observation Report
I haven’t really thought of Game Development communities before. I’ve been thinking about what I want to do after the course, and I’d love to make to make my own game. I searched for what communities are out there that align with my aspirations and found www.gamedev.net .
It was founded in 1999 and has been used as a resource to help with game development. The format of the community is forum based; members can post any questions. There are also other helpful things for the community such as job postings, blogs and portfolios. This makes it easy to find someone to collaborate, for instance, if you’re programming a game and need help with the assets, you can find someone in the community to help. There is also a link to tutorials which has saved forum posts from members and there is a discord group to join which is used for instant messaging.
The language and tone of the community is informal as it is used by complete beginners and people with a lot of experience. This creates a relaxed atmosphere and allows users to learn and develop from each other. Looking through some of the posts, the community tries to help each other, but some members answers can be a bit blunt, although they seem to have good intentions.
There are events that the community goes to, but they don’t host any specific events. The main event that I found is Independent Games Festival (IGF). They have a news section on the site which gives information on submitting a game for the festival with things like submission dates and deadlines. This also encourages the community to collaborate with each other to submit a game. I haven’t found anything specific about the members of the site meeting up with each other but I think if a group are collaborating on a project and have submitted it to IGF, they will meet up as a team.
They have a few different modes of interaction. The main one is the forum itself which is used to post questions or seek collaboration. Another use of the forum is to post guides which are then saved under the tutorial section making it easy for them to be accessed. They also use a discord server where they can chat together more instantly and perhaps further relaxed. On discord there is also a voice chat option which can be used to go through more complicated issues as it can be easier to talk about it than post on a forum. There is also the potential to host training sessions through the discord voice feature, but I haven’t found any evidence of that. Twitter and Facebook are also advertised on the site. The main purpose of the twitter seems to be posting tutorial forum posts which is helpful for people that don’t check the forum every day and has the potential of reaching a wider audience and growing the community. There are also posts about wanting people for projects which again, can be used to reach a wider audience. Facebook seems to be used in the exact same way as twitter.
I’ve had a look through the forum, and it took me a while to find the rules. They weren’t pinned on the front pages as I’d expect, I had to click on For Beginners and it then showed a pinned post for them. A new member of the community may not necessarily be a beginner so might not see these. There are rules for the post to put as much information as possible, as it would be difficult to answer the question otherwise but there are also rules for veterans such as to be forgiving in responses, reminding them they were new once too. There is also the general rule to be respectful to other members.
Overall it seems a great community to be a part of, especially if you’re new to Game Development. It also seems to be a good place to find someone to collaborate with. I have signed up to the site and joined the discord and intend to be part of the community in future to help with my own development.
Reflections
As stated in my report, I haven’t really thought much about communities to join but after researching http://www.gamedev.net, I can see how useful it can be. Ridge (2019) says that it can be used to learn a lot, quickly making people experts, obviously depending on the subject. Getting more involved in the community will definitely help me learn a lot and if I get stuck on something I can reach out for help. It does seem very strict when asking technical questions, they need to know everything, which is understandable as you never know where the problem could be. I’ve had a lot of professional experience raising bugs and explaining problems to colleagues so I think I’ll be good at this. The community can tell me exactly what they need from me if I missed something out, they can be blunt at times from what I’ve seen but I do think they are genuinely trying to help. I interoperate that kind of language as constructive feedback which is always helpful.
References
Ridge, L., 2019. Professional Development Communities of Practice – Training Industry. [online] Training Industry. Available at: <https://trainingindustry.com/articles/strategy-alignment-and-planning/professional-development-communities-of-practice/> [Accessed 23 November 2021].
Richard Charles Ellis 