Play: GamesLord of the Fans: How to Keep Trigger-Happy Gamers in LineRyan Bowling is the weariest trooper behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. As the community manager for the game's developer, Infinity Ward, his job is to keep demanding fans informed — and happy. And he has plenty of company. Game communities have been online since Quake, id's first-person shooter, booted up in 1996. Here's a look at the evolution:
Game: Quake
Year: 1996
Community: The root of the first full-blown online gamer community (long before community managers became hired guns), complete with teams – aka clans – that compete at local area network parties. Id Software, Quake's creators, seed the community by posting early blogs and deathmatching at tourneys. The community births QuakeCon, an annual gathering for shooter fiends near id's headquarters in Mesquite, Texas.
See more: planetquake.gamespy.com
Game: Ultima Online
Year: 1997
Community: The Petri dish for massively multiplayer online role-playing geeks. Richard Garriott launches this pioneering, Net-enabled installment from his epic fantasy series. Volunteer players — called counselors — struggle to manage nascent griefers and cheaters. UO's counselors later file a class-action suit against (and settle with) Electronic Arts for compensation.
See more: www.uoherald.com/town
Game: EverQuest
Year: 1999
Community: Sony Online Entertainment's MMORPG takes online fantasy into 3-D. Role players rejoice and spend inordinate amount of time on EverCrack. SOE employs community managers to troll the game for gold farmers, players generating ill-gotten booty. One gamer-turned-CM launches the EverQuest Fan Faire, an offline gathering that takes cosplay to suburban hotels – and cruise ships!
See more: eqplayers.station.sony.com
Game: Bridge
Year: 2002
Community: Casual gamers. At the turn of the century, players of online parlor games – word search, bridge, Scrabble – become the secret powerhouse online. Sites from Yahoo! Games to Electronic Arts' Pogo.com compete for eyeballs. The solution? Hands-on community management. At Pogo, the CM doles out virtual badges to winners of the hit game, Word Whomp Whackdown.
See more: www.pogo.com, games.yahoo.com, zone.msn.com
Game: The Sims Online
Year: 2002
Community: Meta-gamers. The online version of the best-selling computer game of all time drew a new breed of players online – pervs! Players feverishly uploaded nude patches to genitalize their Sims. The game's community managers never expected to be running a nudist colony.
See more: thesims2.ea.com
Game: World of Warcraft
Year: 2004
Community: The most rabid of all MMORPGs, WoW takes the Guinness World Record title for most subscribers – 10 million and counting – in 2008. That's a lot of guild members to manage. The creators of WoW, Blizzard Entertainment, launch a full-scale management team – handling everything from gold farming to phishing and bots. Blizzard has the most elaborate CM wiki around.
See more: www.wowwiki.com
