Reflections on the Role of Community in Games
I won’t bury the lede on this one: if you’re wondering why things have been a bit quiet here, it’s because I’ve been working on a small personal project! I’ve made a conversion guide for making an RPG character into an X-Wing pilot card, with some guidance for running space combat using the X-Wing rules. This is a little fan project I’ve been cooking up for a while, and I think players of both games will get a kick out of it. Check it out in the Games for Download section!
With that out of the way, I want to delve back into a topic I’ve touched on a number of times in the past: the role of community in games. I’ve discussed how fan works can affect the way that games exist and are played, recontextualizing and transforming the original work. But I haven’t gotten much into one of the most influential ways fans impact most games: community-building.
I started reflecting on this because Shane Mok and Gerentt Chan of the Fearless Gundarks were kind enough to invite me to on to a panel discussion they were holding with community pillars Dee Yun and Ben Doyle. The topic was Tournament Organizers, rules adjudication, and judging, and you should go check out the episode if you are curious - Gerentt, Dee, and Ben all speak very thoughtfully on some complex topics of rules authority and community good and I don’t make (too many) rules gaffs! I’m not going to rehash this conversation, though. Instead, I want to consider something more basic: what are the structures (physical, social, digital) around which a game community can form and be sustained?
Platform and Function
1913 illustration of HG Wells playing Little Wars, courtesy the BBC. Read about it here!
The type of platform used by a community matters, and will shape the way it forms and grows. If the community is local and spreads by word of mouth around a local game store, it will tend to function a bit like a club, with particular traditions and tendencies that are perpetuated from veteran grognards to newer entrants. Additionally, players will tend to play “at the same level,” using community standards to enforce balance to some degree. This can range from light social pressure not to take “cheesy” lists to full-on banning of certain game elements or lists that are viewed as being too influential. In this way, the meta in a physical community will often self-curate away from the worst play experiences, even when they are optimal.
By contrast, if the community is centered around a digital platform like Facebook, Discord, or similar, it will often grow in a very different way. Decorum and rules of engagement won’t generally be as universally enforced through social pressure, and there will be far less pressure not to bring lists that make the opponent groan - after all, the opponent isn’t someone you’re likely to have to deal with next week at the store. But on the other hand, the community itself has the potential to be more accessible. Because everyone doesn’t need to be able to reach a single location, a digital community may draw people from geographically diverse backgrounds. Digital communities can also help break down some of the behaviors that make game store crews behave like a clique. A lack of shared group traditions and history makes the community much more approachable. This isn’t to say that digital communities can’t be toxic (ask anyone who has played a video game or been on the wrong Facebook group), but if well-curated, digital communities can be more approachable in some ways than many friendly local game store (FLGS) playgroups.
Most tabletop wargames have a mix of physical and digital communities, which interact in various ways (or, in some cases, don’t interact at all). For many years, Armada’s “Vassal Meta” was well-known to be completely different from its physical space meta due to the precision with which it could be played and the fact that many players stuck purely to one or the other. Warhammer 40,000’s highly competitive digital play community is similarly segmented from its physical space community, which tends to be very hobby-oriented.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, X-Wing has moved to a Tabletop-Simulator-oriented meta. In some ways, we saw tension arise around what was a physically-oriented game entering into the digital space. The rise of the 6-Nantex list would likely not have been so oppressive if it hadn’t coincided with the shift to a digital meta, as the monetary cost to actually buy the list is high and the social pressure not to be “that player” can be even higher. Both of these factors were ameliorated by the digital-oriented tournament scene. On the other hand, X-Wing made some incredible inroads during this time, with numerous large-scale successful events despite a global pandemic. Many people I’ve spoken to have appreciated being able to expand their regular playgroup beyond their FLGS, and really valued the friendships they’d developed from digital events. Still other groups have stopped playing entirely during this time, waiting out the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how the community re-congeals (or doesn’t) once in-store play is safe and accessible again.
Pillars of the Community
Notice how it’s still standing because there are a bunch of them.
On the stream, one thing that stuck out to me was when Dee discussed how he never really set out to be one of the worldwide leading voices on X-Wing rules adjudication, or even a TO. He stepped into the role because he loved playing the game, and the job was open and needed filling. This resonated with me not because I thought it was unusual, but because I’ve seen this happen time and again in wargaming communities I’ve been a part of.
In my observation, at least for miniatures games, a lot of work tends to fall on a few individuals in the community because they’re the ones energized to do it. Ambitious events that draw large amounts of players require prime movers willing to organize, rent space, prepare prizes, and (for many games) paint loads of terrain. While some groups do a good job with delegation, it inevitably seems like a few people end up especially pivotal to the event actually happening. Because community events for non-professionalized games usually aren’t professionalized undertakings, they have all the hallmarks of any volunteer-based organization: the really passionate people make them happen.
For a community to persist, though, there always need to be energized people in these roles. When these roles are vacant, the community fades. When I graduated high school and left the Magic: The Gathering club to a disinterested successor, it quickly disintegrated. I later watched this happen with a local Warhammer Fantasy Battles community shortly after the end of the game’s publication. While there was no particular reason the community couldn’t have continued to run events (it’s not like Games Workshop was formally sanctioning anything they did anyway), the people who had been those prime movers decided they wanted to take the opportunity to step down, and nobody moved in to replace them.
The important thing to remember here is that, on the community side, and nobody is under any obligation to put their time towards anyone else’s enjoyment unless it’s something they want to do. No individual can be asked to do everything, or even one specific thing, forever. This means that if the members of a community want it to persist in perpetuity, they must make the conscious choice to invest in the future: nurturing new players, preparing for succession of responsibilities, and allowing people to shift in roles based on their needs at the time.
Size Matters (Not)?
Nobody wanted to admit it, but after day three of training, the Dagobah dejarik meta was already getting stale, and not just because Yoda was cheating.
Gerentt mentioned during the stream that the Singapore community isn’t especially large, but it has produced some powerhouse players despite its relatively small size, including 2017 Worlds winner Justin Phua. I thought this was also a pretty interesting observation, because it speaks to something I think a lot of people worry about unnecessarily - community size, and whether their community is growing or not.
For a game community to thrive, it needs to be at or above replacement rate for its high-energy roles (as mentioned above). It also needs new entrants to the community, lest everyone get totally sick of playing against their available opponents. But beyond that, a community’s absolute size doesn’t necessarily determine its viability in the long term (and, as evidenced by the Gundarks, doesn’t determine the competitive strength of its players). A small but highly energized community can have a large impact on a game’s worldwide scene. And a minis game can also thrive in an individual store even if the members never go on the internet to discuss it with others. An RPG can thrive at a single table as long as someone is willing to GM it.
Every year at GenCon (except this last one, for obvious reasons), you see evidence of this. People who travel from hundreds of miles away to play BattleTech editions that have been out of print for years, or the Wizards of the Coast Star Wars minis game. West End’s Star Wars RPG is older than I am and regularly has as many sold-out tables at Gen Con as its modern equivalents. None of this would happen without a solid community that wants to engage with the game, but these communities aren’t huge, either - just sufficiently energized and engaged to keep the flame alive.
There’s obviously a lot more to say about games communities. But I think it’s important to reflect on how games exist in the playing, and communities make a lot of this playing happen. Thus, the community often sets the tone for the way a game exists and is perceived in the wider world.