Charm Your Communities ✨
Make joyful moments with your game communities — what, why, and how.
Hey! I’m Victoria Tran, the Community Director at Innersloth (we made a game called Among Us.) Previously I worked at Kitfox Games as their Communications Director (Boyfriend Dungeon, Dwarf Fortress, etc.) I love exploring ways we can create intentional, better, and more compassionate online communities. You can see everything else I’ve written on my site or find me on Twitter.
Can You Pet The Dog basically created an entire cultural revolution in games in 2019.
It’s a Twitter account made to answer one question: in this video game, can you pet the dog? (Unless it’s Casual Friday, then it’s about petting various other creatures!) It’s a simple account all about the charm and joy of finding a pettable creature in a game.
What is it about this tiny moment that has garnered over 480k+ followers and inspired various games to include dog pats in their system?
That pat is a joyful, yet often overlooked or missed, point in the game experience. And it’s charming as heck.
My work often involves throwing around a lot of words that sound like big, lofty ideals: kindness, compassion, connection, positive, belonging, etc. I get that these words can seem amorphous and frivolous — how are you actually supposed to do that, and is it even practical? Yes! But the work that goes behind creating kinder, better communities aren’t grand gestures of glamorously paraded moments. They are small, daily activities and experiences that trigger larger change overtime.
So let’s talk about delightful moments in games and online communities! These aren’t the huge, integral, or mainstage moments I’m talking about — not the subversion of the Stanley Parable or the satisfying gunplay mechanics of Destiny 2. These are small moments (similar to “Easter Eggs”, but not quite) that can charm your communities in AND outside of the games themselves.
We’ll dive into creating charming moments in the community spaces people gather in, in the games they play, and why we should create them.
What does “charming your community” mean?
Charming communities is about community-first building. It’s starting small and focusing on creating a truly integrative environment and place that cares about each other, which in turn helps your studio scale and sustain itself.
When I talk about charming communities, I mean purposefully crafting a warm, vibrant experience that people will associate with your studio.
The specific feelings can vary, but I’m usually referring to qualities like these:
- Playfulness
- Delight
- Positivity
- Earnestness
- Attention to detail
Charming your community involves staying aware of community sentiment and member’s experiences, putting time and energy into finding special moments worth a bit of extra investment.
Why should we care?
Creating intentional, authentic, and warm community spaces is something to always aspire to. The sense of connection that stems from feeling included and welcomed creates a true sense of “togetherness,” which community devs work hard for.
Charming communities isn’t just about that though — it helps integrate individuals into the community. When people first hear about your game and you, it doesn’t mean they’re a part of your community yet. It just means they know who you are. They may share an interest in your game, but they may have no relationship or mutual concern for each other. No connection. And that’s not what a community is — that’s just an audience.
One of the core responsibilities of a community manager/developer is to figure out how to welcome strangers into their spaces, and I think of that as the ✨community integration journey✨.
We can split up the community journey into four stages:
New Member → Regular Member → Loyal Supporter → Advocate
New Member
These are the people that have just discovered your game, maybe just plopped into your Discord, or are curiously scrolling through your Steam page/website after hearing about it.
Main characteristics:
- Difficult to get them to take action (buy your game, join your community, get invested in the studio)
- Can be completely turned off to your studio, devs, and games if they have a bad first experience
Regular Member
These are people who choose to stick around for a bit after playing your game. If your game is still in development, maybe they hang around your community spaces passively, or throw you a follow to casually be kept up to date.
Main characteristics:
- Comes more than once, but no reason to actively choose your game over another or get it if another similar comes out
- Is not particularly attached to your community space over another
Loyal Supporter
They’re invested in your community and the game’s development! Woohoo! These community members have invested a significant amount of time into your game and are committed to being a part of the game’s journey. Even if there’s other competition out there, they’re likely to still come back to your game, or still have a certain place in their heart for your work.
Main characteristic:
- Chooses your game or community space over the competition, but can be whisked away if another studio comes around with a better game and they get dragged into the hype
Advocate
Members who are active participants, contributors, and helpers are EVERYTHING in communities. They help us create the communities we strive for, helping us and other members become healthier, wiser, and more autonomous.
Main characteristics:
- Word of mouth! They tell their friends to join!
- More credible to their friends/contact when it comes to game recommendations, vouching for your decisions, etc.
- Provide feedback and empower you to do better
- Welcomes people in the community and actively wants to help them
As a community director/developer/manager, we need to ask ourselves: how do we move community members along in this process?
There are a number of ways to do this: the game experience itself, the community surrounding it, merchandising, marketing, etc. But one of the most meaningful ways to garner goodwill towards your studio is by charming them with positive experiences, which I’ll explain how to do further down.
More importantly, it’ll make your community a healthier and more pleasant place to be in! A community where members feel listened to, heard, and like they’re truly interacting with the developers and each other helps create a deeper sense of trust and understanding. Game development is wrought with issues, but a community that supports each other through it is worth everything and a great motivator. Creating charming moments not only deepens bonds, but can be a way we community managers/devs reflect back to our players that we appreciate them and want to put some extra effort.
How to charm your communities
Many people falsely assume that just more time spent in your community equates to a better relationship. “Time” is vague and shaky: how much time is enough? Does more time = better quality relationships?? And why does it feel like we’re all running out of time aggGhHHhh (okay that last one is not related.)
Basically, time isn’t a great indicator of how much you actually have positive feelings towards someone. Think of a relative you may dislike but have known all your life versus someone you just met that you felt instantly connected to. Many relationships don’t grow predictably, so what’s the best way to encourage positive community connections? By creating meaningful moments.
And the best part? We can design for these moments! We don’t have to just hope that these moments will happen by chance (nor should we). Community managers/developers in particular are well suited for this because we’re the ones that are closest to the community, their needs, wants, and inside jokes.
We can help make those few seconds or minutes that elevate an experience and connect the players. Being part of exceptional moments makes being a part of the community meaningful. That meaning makes a truly strong community.
Side note: Charming your communities must still be backed up by actually fulfilling at least their core needs. Players can forgive small problems, but no amount of charming moments can save a game that completely disappoints, breaks entirely, has shady studio practices, disappointing customer service, etc. Good relationships are built on trust and respect.
Creating joyful moments
Okay, now how do we ACTUALLY make moments joyful and transformational?
In The Power of Moments by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, they outline the 3 main ways moments stand out to us: the “peaks,” “pits,” and “transitions.” For now, I’ll focus on how we create peaks — the delightful, positive emotions that are associated with a moment. As far as charming your communities go, this is probably the moment you’ll be consistently aiming for.
Generally, peak moments are created when you can make one or more of these experiences in an interaction:
- Elevation: surprising events, extraordinary experiences
- Insight: shaping the way someone sees the world
- Connection: creating meaning or deepening ties with others
- Pride: significant milestones or being recognized by others
When building a community, you don’t just want a neutral community experience with no complaints. We want to elevate our communities to feel engaged and motivated to participate. That’s when your players start to feel like a true community, and begin to encourage, support, and connect with each other.
I’m going to dive into ways I’ve created moments, but keep in mind that everyone’s personality, game genre, studio vibe, values, humor, and community are completely different and contextual. What works for me might not work for you, and vice versa. It’s all about finding your own voice!
Remember these examples may include one or more of the other experiences in them!
Elevation
Elevation is all about surprising events, creating extraordinary experiences, and/or breaking a prescribed expectation of how things should be. I like silly, chaotic, inconsequential jokes in my work, so moments of elevation are one of my favorite things to do.
When I’m trying to elevate, I think: What are people expecting me to do? How are things usually done, and how do I break past that routine? (Less professionally, I think: “what is something suuuuuuper silly that would bring me the most enjoyment right now?”) Some examples of this below!
- Breaking routines. This is all about subverting expectations. Back when I wrote game newsletters in the voice of each character for the game Boyfriend Dungeon, I just plopped a ton of “meows” in the text when it was the cat character’s turn. They expected a typical marketing newsletter and instead I just filled their inboxes with meows.
- Community spotlights. Spotlighting community members as part of the game or outward facing communications is a ton of fun, even more so if it spices up a normally overlooked area of your communications. I think of it as a fun “reward” for paying attention to something that people often scroll past. Example: Among Us Steam reviews.
- Fun details. I love adding small, inconsequential quirks in anything I do. The reason this works so well is it shows off relatable personality. Highly specific details bring a little bit of spice to the table — whether that’s yours specifically or the entire studios! Example: Boyfriend Dungeon has bubble tea as the healing item out of pure love for it.
- Another example: If you scroll through the Pupperazzi store page, I added an entire section just “for dogs.”
- Okay one more: there’s a secret role in the Among Us Discord that opens up a Pretzel Stand channel, born from an inside joke between the moderators. You can’t do anything in it. It just has a picture of pretzels. (Your staff and mods can be part of creating moments too; they’re part of the community!)
Also shout out to Xbox for the way they handled the leak of their Xbox Series X — the fact they sort of just owned their leak was extremely amusing.
Insight
World-shaping moments of insight are harder to create, as these are deeply personal. These may also work with certain games too, depending on the subject matter. For instance I’m not entirely sure what sort of self-actualizations people are having when they play Among Us…. unless maybe we count some people realizing they’re really good at murder and betrayal.
I do have one example from my own experiences though, and that’s with Boyfriend Dungeon when we were running a booth at a convention. I got this email a few days later (which I got permission to share):
Purely thinking of charming communities and creating special moments as a marketing ploy is a huge disservice to the underlying principle of what I’m trying to convey:that caring about others and creating true connections has meaning.
If we can create kinder places in the spaces we create and work in, people can form real bonds they couldn’t otherwise. I hope those connections helps them face the outside world too.
Connection
How many times can I say connection in this blog post? Let me count the ways (so far: 8).
Anyways, when we talk about creating experiences of connection (9), I often think of these as experiences that have direct ties or roots to the community. Things like:
- Inside jokes. Lucifer Within Us has a collectable and achievement based on the “Devil’s Herb”, which is a running gag in the Kitfox Games Discord server due to the split feelings on cilantro (more specifically, my extreme hate for it.) It’s a secret nod of appreciation and acknowledgement to those who participate in the community. Plus, the community knows they had a hand in a tiny part of the game! The good thing about the cilantro joke too was it delighted others who haven’t participated in the community, as it pulls in elements of unexpected levity too.
- Acknowledgement. I’ve talked about how my tactics for the Among Us Twitter account has been about connection (10) and responding frequently already. This is one of the quickest ways I’ve created charming moments but I do it because I know how strong those moments of recognition have been for me. WAY back before I got my start in games, I tweeted at Juicy Beast that I loved their game. They simply Liked my tweet, but knowing they even saw my tweet caused this extremely giddy feeling in me I STILL remember years later.
- These moments of insight can also form when we ground parts of our work in reality and common moments many of us have experienced.
Pride
Creating moments of pride is about recognizing the work and effort people have invested into you and your community. The simplest way I do that is to try and comment (or at least like) every single piece of fan art/user generated content I see on our social platforms — whether that’s on Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, etc. It can be as simple as a kid’s drawing of a Crewmate or a highly polished 3D short animation. Supporting and lifting the community up is a great way to charm them!
And sometimes — it doesn’t even have to be directly related to fan art. Here’s an example:
I interact with Twitter users regardless of follower count. A particularly funny reply from one user got me roping in Xbox into the jokes, and it spawned into an amusing thread for the whole community to take part in. The best part was seeing the original poster’s reaction to it all. :)
Think about moments in your own life outside of games. Feeling like you matter or are seen is charming in practically any context, and it’s a big part of the idea behind charming communities. If that can brighten someone’s day, then I’m happy to do it.
A Note on Tone
To be perfectly clear, not all “peak” moments have to be funny in order to be charming or meaningful. Remember: it’s about finding your own voice, one that fits your community and your game! For instance, KO_OP has a wonderfully sweet tone in their communications which fits their playful, cinematic games, and Darkest Dungeon leverages their thematic dark undertones in their communications to match the game perfectly.
Truly respecting, caring, and being a part of your community will better set you up to be able to connect with them.
Conclusion
One reason it is hard to build a peak is that it is no one’s job to do it and it is a hassle and never urgent. — The Power of Moments
Charming your communities isn’t about “better marketing”. Thinking of it that way completely eradicates the core idea of why we as community builders want to make moments matter: to connect, delight, and foster a true sense of meaning in being together. Eliminate the values, and you’ll get the cold, “silence brand” moments we all hate so much.
Community-led growth is all about investing time, cultivating, and caring for the members that join early on, and charming them into loving what their community stands for and spreading it to others. This rings true for communities of all sizes!
There’s no point, no sustainability, and no joy in having a community you don’t particularly enjoy interacting with or that feel you don’t care about them. By creating moments, we as developers can build strong ties, a mature community, and grow together.
I love communities. I love these spaces because I see them as true places to find genuine love, understanding, and connection (last time, I promise) with others. There is a space where compassion and ethics can fuse with technology, and I hope we continue to give more consideration to it — and I think a good way to start is to think of how we can make delightful little memories for others.
❤
Biggest thanks to Josh Boykin for editing! Find him on Intelligame or Twitter.
Without him, this post would’ve been quite bad. Trust me. I was ready to hit “publish” on a very bad first draft.
If you’re interested in following me for more spicy content, you can find me on Twitter or on my website.
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