Tweens, predominantly female, occupied the majority of the demographic. Players coordinated events and room hosting, playing games in the freeform social space provided them in exchange for increased brand awareness. The Production Team kept the world rich with frequent updates driven by community input, with new clothing, items, rooms, contests and events, content that most subscription-paying users would envy. It was an emulated model of the physical Magic Kingdom where kids could congregate and go on adventures and share stories. The environment of VMK was definitively Disney, but a softly diluted version with non-brand characters. Language, meme and tropes are the first icons of culture, and VMK’s would take any newcomer a while to get the hang of. “I glove my duh.duh” was “I love my dad” in the restriction of speech allowed. As a social space goes, it was remarkable in that it had a dictionary-based chat that precipitated a language all to its own. Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK) was a unique online social game with a half-million players from the tween age group. I’d like to share some of that experience with you, and my takeaways from it.īefore my time with Bestofmedia (now Purch,) 7 or so years ago, I was the Community Manager for Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom. But I’ve also been asked to shepherd a couple to the grave, and there are some dark lessons that watching a community die can teach you that cannot otherwise be learned. I consider myself fortunate to have been in a position to oversee the construction of some really fantastic communities and study the anatomy of how to put them together from the ground up. We talk a lot about growth from the community angles when we look at new avenues of expansion, but I’d like to take a moment to discuss another part of the life cycle of a community – namely, a community’s death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |