Okay, here's how it went:
First off, the dissertation changed a little during the writing. Not significantly enough to make all the data collection pointless, of course, but, well, some ideas worked and some didn't. The main change was the content analysis, which ended up not being very helpful at all. I ended up with some pretty superficial findings like "
people are more likely to post about creativity on the Architecture boards,"
which I don't think you needed a dissertation to figure out for yourselves. So that got largely dropped, and I focused on the interview responses instead (which, again, were incredibly helpful!). I also ended up focusing the study a little more on community identity, rather than online communities in general, just as something to anchor the study around.
So, what did I find? Well, although I can't give you a fully detailed account for a while (dissertation are gonna take a few months to get marked and processed and everything), I can give you a summary of what I think are the key points I found. Note that a lot of these are my opinion based on the interviews and what I've noticed while I've been here, so you may well think I'm wrong. That's fair enough, although there's not much I can do about it now.
1) Firstly, there are definite expectations of etiquette around here, and more than a few of you pointed out that people who break this etiquette, accidentally or otherwise, tend to get made fun of. That's nothing new or unique to this community - there's at least one study from as far back as the mid-90s which noticed that people in newsgroups who made a faux-pas were strongly disapproved of. There's a bit of concern that this might be exclusionary to people trying to participate in the community, although obviously no-one here is trying to drive out other people.
2) Caravel provides spaces of creativity in the Architecture boards and the Hold boards (as well as other places like contests). In these spaces, there seems to be a few rigid expectations for how to contribute - if I want to make a hold I need to use DROD to build a hold and it needs to be fully functional (rooms need to be completable, etc) before it can enter the Holds board.
Now, there's a guy called Jaron Lanier who I'm guessing a few of you will know of - he was a pioneer of virtual reality technology and is pretty important in computer science. Lanier is strongly opposed to the Web 2.0 trend of collaboration online, and wrote a book setting out his arguments (
You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto). One of his key arguments is that individual identities are sacrificed in the name of conforming to a particular idea of community or to fit into templates set out by websites - for example, Wikipedia demands a particular writing style with an impartial viewpoint, so you can't bring your own ideas and flair into any articles you write for Wikipedia. So with the DROD community, it could be that these rigid expectations drain individual identities from a hold to enforce community expectations.
Obviously, this doesn't quite hold water. These processes of quality control are put in place because holds in DROD aren't passively experienced by the user - the user has to actually play the holds to get entertainment out of them. The idea that holds need to be completable, for example, is largely to avoid annoying the player, not to squash identity.
Those first two points don't really say much about community identity and creativity, but they tie into the third point:
3) There's an expected, though unofficial, process of creativity in how everyone on the Architecture board will provide suggestions for how to improve the hold. This process of collaboration encourages a kind of creative etiquette - from the interview responses there seems to be certain expectations of some kind of difficulty, avoiding tedious ideas for puzzles and rooms, and so on. But other expressions of identity and creativity within the holds, like character dialogue, tend to be left alone save for spelling corrections. So instead of quashing individual identity in the name of community expectations, you encourage certain values in hold design without harming the original intent of the holds in terms of puzzle ideas and storylines.
So I think community identity is built and reinforced at least in part by creativity being standardised to fit community expectations without sacrificing individual expressions of identity to do it. Obviously this is a very condensed form of the argument, and it's a bit more detailed in the dissertation, but I'm erring on the side of caution here still. I hope that's clear enough - I can try to clarify if need be. To be honest, much of this is personal opinion based on the evidence, because you would not believe how little geographical literature there is on this kind of thing.
Thank you again for all your help! The dissertation's all finished now, and I couldn't have done it without you.
I think I got at least one quote in there from each person who responded, but even if I didn't use your responses you were still very helpful.
One of these days I should probably get around to making my own hold. I've got a handful of rooms on my hard drive from 2010 here but I've never done anything with them...
