Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Site visit
For my site visit/interview, I went to my steam community's ventrilo server. Ventrilo is like a mass voice chat room, its just like talking to someone on the phone, except its like talking to a bunch of people at a time. In ventrilo, you use an alias and not your real name. In addition, members of our community come from all over the western hemisphere, like Sharocko from New Orleans, Dire from New Jersey, Blackrain from California, Nihilistoic from Florida, Bud from Brazil, Bullseye from Canada, and the list goes on. Fortunately, I have administrator privalages in that server and I was able to create a private channel and drag other members into the channel to interview them. I asked why they thought we were a community. I received a variety of answers to that question so this is definately one question I am going to reword or make more specific. After reading some of my classmates' comments regarding this post as it was work in progress, i don't think it was hard to get information from my community because ventrilo is like skype except that it is a better program. Ventrilo is like an online speech program so its just like talking face to face with someone and you heard all the changes in their tones of voice. Returning to the interview, I also asked questions like, " What is your favorite genre of all games?" and "What are some major problems facing gamers today?". Once again I got mixed responses for all my questions except for, "What is your favorite genre of all games?" to which the majority of the members responded FPS( First Person Shooter). I didn't get very many answers that were representative of the whole community so I think I am going to refine my questions more before I interview them again this week.
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4 comments:
It quite interesting how in most of our communities one of the main factors is living in the same general area, but for yours that isn't really a consideration at all. Do you think your community will be more diverse because it includes people from many areas?
Was it hard to get information from people because you can not see them or hear their tone of voice? Also, do you think the information that you're getting is true? I think you're community is very cool and different.
I really enjoy your community selection, and it made me realize that at alternate community I could have selected was Xbox Live, a similar community for Xbox console owners. It would have been interesting to compare with your interviews of PC gamers.
One question though. In your post you said that you used your administrator privileges to "drag" otherr users into priavte chat. What does that actually mean, ie., did your interviewies come willingly? What could that mean about the reliability of their answers?
That's a pretty cool community. How did you get into that?
Also, you said that people joined from all over, so how did you plan your questions so that they would work for everyone, no matter where they were coming from?
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