Your Community Management Plan

The CDD (Community Design Document) and CMP (Community Management Plan) are documents used to frame and guide you through community and game development process.

Community websites are typically developed in tandem with the game, making a firm document critical to a successful multi-team collaboration. The CDD and CMP are as critical to the success of the community as the Game Design Document is to the success of the game. 

Using a CDD and CMP helps to stimulate the development team to recognize the scale, scope and importance of treating the community development process no differently than they treat the game development process. It also serves as a valuable roadmap reminding all parties involved of the end goal of the development cycle and how all the pieces fit together.

The Community Design Document is a blue print for features in your community site. Any and all features should be very accurately described with as much granular detail possible. The feature interaction with the game data and with other features in the community should be clearly described.

The CDD should describe the processes of interaction the user will undertake from a very holistic view. Will the users profile be altered by their choices in the game? Will affiliation with a particular clan or guild impact the users access to certain areas of the community?

What mechanisms for user recognition will you put in place, how will users learn about them? What impact does community growth have on the game? What level of time commitment will be required of users to reach various depths of the community?

The CDD is also a political roadmap for your community management team. What mechanisms will be deployed to enable public order and civility? Community managers need to have the tools in place to warn, admonish and ban users from a community.

Essential to the process of punitive action is a set of rules that are clearly defined and available to all users. The mechanisms for punitive actions must be transparent and in the event of an appeal, be able to be reversible.

Community management and moderation -- reactive vs. proactive

Managing a community requires two distinct types of moderation, reactive and proactive.  Reactive moderation is the act of monitoring user posts and ensuring that the conversations in forums and content uploaded is appropriate to the community.

Profanity and questionable content are constant in all communities; it is up to the community managers to determine what fits within the community, and what is appropriate for the culture.

Proactive moderation is the creation of and fostering of conversation and user activity that is engaging and entertaining. A good moderator will be able to create a new topic of dialogue which draws a lot of user interest and discussion.

Contests and tournaments are also very proactive in nature, and foster a lot of user interaction. Good proactive moderation doesn't require too much moderator time, but generates lots of user activity.

What does the future look like?

Publishers and developers will continue to realize the inherent value of online game communities and will develop more complex and robust communities. Online communities will become standard features that gamers will expect to see included with the game. This will drive competition in the space and foster innovation and improvements in the user experience both in-game and in the community.

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have all begun to embrace the power of community and have deployed features and platforms to foster community. The recent announcement of Xbox Avatars and improvements to the Live service speak to a strategic initiative with community as a key component for the Xbox platform. 

Community sites and services will merge so that your game data is as portable and universally accessible as a common web-based email service. Users will be able to interact with community members on any platform they choose, mobile, PC, or their home console. 

The community will be as critical to the overall experience of a game as the game itself. We are inherently social beings and though multiplayer emulates well much of the social competition that we seek as individuals, only a community site can provide the true sense of social belonging that a social structure can provide.