GDC07: GameSpy covers the Sharing Control panel
The article includes some choice quotes from what my partner John Donham called my “Khrushchev moments”. 🙂
Any notion of control we have is an illusion… managing is a generous word for what we do with communities. I prefer to call it community relations, because it’s a lot more like a relationship, occasionally an abusive one… it’s about acknowledging that the control is in their hands in the first place.
Be human! We don’t like being told we’re cogs, or numbers! You want to have a good relationship with your customers? Think of them as your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend… It’s easy!…It’s so frustrating that we’re stuck in this stupid box of thinking of them as ‘them.’ You want people to come back to you, you have to fucking get along!
Ray Muzyka’s follow-up to this was priceless, btw. 😉
5 Responses to “GDC07: GameSpy covers the Sharing Control panel”
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You said that “any notion of control we have is an illusion”. I think you should extend that claim to the notion that the community has any control, too. You don’t have control. They don’t have control. We need to eliminate the us-versus-them-ism in community relations and start thinking of community relations as cultivating meaningful relationships between people. It takes two to tango and people to make a party. A relationship necessitates that the people involved are working together toward common goals.
But I think you said something similar when you said, “Think of them as your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend…”
A few additional thoughts…
This is the crux of my argument against David and Kim’s support of Kotaku in the recent Kotaku-Sony debacle. If you value a relationship, you don’t make any stupid moves no matter what happens and no matter who says what. You have to be honest, but you also have to be careful. One little slip-up could mean long-term disaster.
Tom Clancy once wrote, "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." Treat all of your stakeholders respectfully. Hopefully, they’ll respond in kind.
Great points Morgan, I agree in premise and we agree on whole in what we’re doing at GLM, this meshes really nicely with the panel discussion I went to on security and privacy as well. The thing is understanding this from the initial design phase through implimentation leads to some significant hurdles as well as some amazing/creative results.
“Surging waters flow together” (Sun Tzu) as it were. Unfortunately, many people just dont “get” that, at any level, business, personal or otherwise.
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