The question of community.

Something weird happened recently: I did an "Ask me Anything" on the NSR Cauldron. Thank you to those kind few who participated. I expected no questions and was surprised to have a few friends come to my rescue.

Sam Dunnewold, game designer and host of the Dice Exploder podcast, asked:

I'm interested in what you think about community building in ttrpgs right now - do we have good communities? Could we build better ones? And most specifically for you, since you seem particularly interested in awards shows as a thing, do you think awards shows could or do play into community building in a productive way?

A new framework for community.

We have good communities. We also have terrible ones. That sounds like fence-riding, but it's true—it depends on the member and what they need, want, and desire from their mutualism (if any).

One thing is certain: most metrics and paradigms used to understand community needs updating. Like journalism, critique, and other neighboring topics, our analysis is rooted in a pre-internet, pre-virtual, pre-pandemic, 20th-century capitalist perspective. I know a lot of folks bemoan or dismiss the idea that community is possible on platforms like Discord, BlueSky, or nebulously through blogging—and I share that feeling (and made some verdicts)—but I also recognize for many there's not much else. Physical third spaces are not just endangered, they're being hunted to extinction by private equity and oppressive systems.

All of this to say, whatever our communities are (and in whatever quality they come), we have to built on what we've got. And we have to keep working on them. Watering. Weeding. Mulching.

What I learned from my first game community in college.

The student organization had somewhere in the range of 100-200 members. We had two rooms in the bowels of the student union, with steam pipes, trash bins, and a maintenance tunnel for company. It was perfect.

It was a closed community. You needed to be enrolled in the university (and likely paying an obscene tuition to a below-average school). You also needed—during my tenure—to be a cultural fit. When I first joined, we had one tiny room and one of the most toxic (and smelliest) memberships imaginable. You know the types. They all had nicknames—partly out of necessity with the number of guys named "John," but also because it was a toxic atmosphere of hazing, No True Scotsman-ing, and low self-esteem.

We had a Warmachine, God, Doctor, Pottery Barn (because he was full of shit), Circuit City, Dr. House, Tac, Bobbles, Goose, Wonder Woman, Betamax, the Artist Formerly Known as Peter, Not-Scottish Grant, Steams, Ryker, and dozens more.

The day I became president and started making changes. I got mine: Kaiser.

College is where I found my love for community building. It was the physicality of it. The walk-and-talks, the nemawashi, and the problems you could solve with water and soap.

But that's not how I got my name. I was a ruthless community manager who destroyed just as much as I built. I kicked out members. Pulled people aside and asked them to come back after they took a shower. I did a lot of things without putting them to a vote—like throwing away the org's printed copies of FATAL and replacing the org's copy of Mein Kampf (righting a wobbly table) with a copy of Thomas Friedman's rag, The World is Flat (also righting the wobbly table). A lot of people hated my tenure. I had sanitized a Libertarian paradise. (And I'd do it again!)

Healthy communities are not soft. They have rules (implicit and explicit), cultural norms, procedures of interaction, methods of organizing, and they have a vision. The best ones codify these powers and visions in the membership and create systems that reward and feed their values. The second best ones elect empowered individuals before quickly demoting them. The communities without vision, guardrails, and failsafes succumb to whatever outsides forces and new members bring to it.

I made a lot of mistakes as a member of that organization, and I'd likely go about it differently as a more experienced and (hopefully) better person. (Never trust leaders who haven't had their teeth kicked in by life.) Here's what I've learned with the benefit of time:

• The motivated hold the most power. I think this is true for digital spaces as well. The people who have the energy to make moves, are the ones that shake things up. Building community requires knowing when to guide these members, and less obviously, when to redirect them.
• The useful member is better than the idealogical one. Communities don't need an "ideas guy" or zealots, they need people who do stuff. Game communities thrive on people who teach and run games. Our convention survived on volunteers who counted tickets. The folks with plans and no calluses are trouble, because they distract and breed discontent.
• Be ruthless and consistent with enforcement. Have hard rules and uphold those hard rules. Make sure everyone knows them. Put them on the wall, point to them often, and keep the enforcement visible. The worst of the worst weaponize an organization's politeness and discretion. When the nazi's show up, don't ask them to leave, tag them like the virus they are, and toss them out. When the bad actors of yesteryear show up, only the pillory will do.
• The small unimportant stuff is the community. The movie nights, the silly traditions, the human stuff—that's the point. The moment those things disappear, people start to burn out, lose interest, and move on. Keep things light. Take time for others. Create nooks and crannies for relationships to grow and flower in. Keep a mix of organized and disorganized.

Why BlueSky can't be a community.

BlueSky has an awesome suite of moderation tools and ways to get started, but a community it is not. The reason is simple: it's effortless. Community needs friction and limitations. This sounds old fashioned and maybe privileged, but bear with me.

Being vulnerable is the entry fee for community. In a physical space, a member's voice and actions have limited reach. If they want their voice and actions to impact others, they have to form relationships and be present. They can't enjoy connections while being anonymous, or occupy a space without abiding by its rules. You know one thing that limits many bad actors from invading game stores? The bell on the door. It's hard to be shitty and be visible.

BlueSky isn't a community. It's not a community because its users are not beholden to others. Every voice is equal regardless of how that voice is used. You can't control who interacts with you or around you—and worse—you can't grasp what's happening in the proverbial room even if you tried. If BlueSky or Twitter were a community in the physical world, it would be a convention hall with multiple Nazi rallies and John Birch Society meetups happening in the same room as pride parades and civil rights marches—an impossible cohabitation. A scenario where only the bad guys win.

But what about places like Discord?

I think places like Discord can be a community, but I think you have to approach them the same way as physical communities. Watering. Weeding. Mulching.

I started an Explorers Discord years ago, but its link isn't public. The reason is simple: I don't enjoy running a digital community. I'm the member who volunteers to paint the walls. Those opportunities don't exist in the digital space. And like I said earlier, it's the motivated who hold power. Since I'm not motivated to run a digital space, I don't put myself in charge of a 24-hr one with an open door.

Big discord servers, like Mothership, Mörk Borg, and MCDM demand active mod teams. Even then, the community is perpetually tenuous. Every wave of new people threatens to push out the old ones, and every dug-in regular threatens to make the place stink without having to smell or wallow in it.

Personally, I think any discord that doesn't have dreams of making it big, should limit themselves to invite-only and regularly purge the roster of malcontents and people who stick around for the promotions channel. At least, that's what I'd do if I wanted it to feel like a community.

The role of award shows in communities.

Award shows are institutions, and while they share obligations like a community, and are often created as a result of community effort, they shouldn't be enshrined with any of its benefits.

In other words, I think good award shows serve communities and bad ones don't. No award show has a right to exist because of its history, influence, or prestige. That right is determined by the communities they serve. I'm currently judging in the ENnies, so I'll leave my feelings about it unresolved. Instead, I'll speak to another show I'm co-hosting next year: The Bloggies.

The one thing better than an award show are a dozen small ones, because they can be tailor-made for specific audiences. In my ideal world, four things would happen:

• Every award show would specialize. The Crit Awards would cover content creators, The Awards would celebrate the weird and experimental, IGDN would hero creators, The Bloggies would focus on blogs (Hey, they're already doing that, how neat!) and the ENnies would focus on game books.
• 3rd communities would host their own community awards. That way, members could be recognized, celebrated, and awarded on that community's values and tastes. Games like Mörk Borg, Mothership, Old School Essentials, and Mausritter are big enough to do it. The original creators could even use the awards to guide and anoint their successors. While curious outsiders could browse the community's shiniest wares once a year.
• More individuals would host personal awards. The more the merrier! I look forward to a few every year, including The Ramanan Sivaranjan Awards for Excellence and The Idle Cartulary Awards for Excellence in Elfgames.
• More award shows would get a Squarespace account. This isn't a paid promotion, but rather an endorsement of no-code solutions for non-coders. Too many of our current award shows are running on Wordpress websites with spaghetti code and not getting updated or representing the work well enough. Can't stomach a cup of Java? Get something Readymade or go with the Webflow.

Final thoughts on community.

Communities are work. For everyone involved. That's what makes them healthy and safe, but it's also why they're meaningful. I still think about my time in college. Most of it was spent playing board games like Dominion, Coup, and Betrayal at House on the Hill, or pretending to be someone else playing Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu, and Traveller.

It's only after leaving that community that I realized the best times were when I wasn't playing games. Like when our convention ended for the day and it was just us coordinators and staff leftover, or when me and the sergeant-at-arms spent a week tackling nerdy tasks, like asking gamers to organize their cables during impromptu LAN parties or addressing "The CAH Infestation of 2013." Every one of those moments is burned into my memory.

My memories are richer because of the communities I made them in.

We'll never have enough and they'll never be good enough, because half of what I think makes community great is the process of making and improving them. I think back to my pitiful garden, currently buried under snow, if it's the vegetables I wanted—I would hate the garden. The trick to gardening is learning to love the gardening itself. The weeding, the mulching, and the watering. That's where the joy is. The tomatoes and herbs are just a bonus.

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