Community Managers: Not Just Forum Moderators Anymore

The role of community management for video games has evolved significantly in recent years, as EVE Online's Valerie Massey -- a 13-year-veteran -- tells it. "Back in 1998, we were the front line support," she recently recalled to Gamasutra. "If a player had problems with the game, they'd contact us and we'd try to resolve their issues." While some companies still view community management as the frontline of technical support, that role has evolved over the past few years. Massey now leads a team of six at CCP Games, a team whose primary function is to be both the voice of the game to its players, and the voice of its players to its designers. "The players tell us what makes them happy, what makes them unhappy, and we relay that information back to the developers," she explains. "Then the developers will say what they can and cannot do to acquiesce to those requests." As a result, community management -- while still brushing shoulders with technical support, PR and marketing -- is rapidly becoming an integral part of game design. "The designers want to know how the gamers are reacting, but they can't spend hours each day reading 200-post forum threads," she says. "So they've come to depend on us to read all the feedback, distill it down into a summary, and then tell them what most of the players want and what they don't want." More insight from Massey, as well as community managers from CrowdStar and Insomniac -- is available in today's Gamasutra feature.