Week 6 Lecture Reflection

Week six’s lecture was given again by John Banks and discussed commerce in communities, drawing on his Trainz/Auran experience. The primary thing I learnt from the lecture is how to develop a successful online community. This included Amy Jo Kim’s nine design strategies and three underlying principles for online community development. Kim approaches online community development in terms of the people within the communities rather than the technologies used, which is secondary in importance. It became apparent to me that it is important to nurture the people who participate in online communities and provide them with a sound and productive environment in order for a community to survive. I found what John and Auran did with Trainz and the online fan community to be really interesting. (I won’t do into depth about it now so read Gamers as Co-Creators: Enlisting the Virtual Audience – A Report from the Net Face by John Banks in Mobilising the Audience). These ideas are really relevant to the uprising of online communities and how they contribute to the development of products; consumers becoming ‘prosumers’. As a side note: game development is growing surprisingly within Queensland! There appears to be an expanding creative cluster of game developers within Brisbane. It will be interesting to see what becomes of it.