Learning from the social ecology of online games

Peter notes, among other things, J.C. Herz’s 4 types of gamers that she outlined in her Etech presentation last week. I wrote the same four points down in my notes in a slightly different way:

1. beat the system
2. model the system
3. run the system
4. kill the system

J.C.’s point was that you can look at software, online communities, and Web sites in the same way. Players in those systems break down into similar groups. MeFi is a great example…you see folks exhibiting all four of those behaviors. In most situations, as much as I get caught up in beating a system (which I shouldn’t do because I’m not very good at it most of the time), I’m a system modeller. I’m much more interested in finding out how the system works than beating it.