jeremy snyder’s meta|remix

sulka haro, lead designer at habbo, has a posting questioning the viability of virtual worlds on the console. from my side, while i’m not a professional game designer, i’m not sure that i agree. Continue reading »

one of the blogs that i really enjoy reading is sanya weathers‘ eating bees blog about community management. i’ll say right off the bat that she’s been at this much longer than i have, and she uses more colorful language than i might , but i almost always agree 100% with her opinions on community management. her most recent post about 5 things you can do to “mess” up your community got me thinking a bit about whether it was possible to give 5 guidelines for not messing up your community. i’m not really sure, but i thought these would be a good 5 to start with:

1. be as honest and open as you can be. honesty is about telling the truth; openness is about disclosing what you can disclose. when you work for a company, things like confidentiality agreements, internal policies and also the fear of putting a bad message out and offending customers or scaring investors sometimes limit what you can say. but anything that you can say that will answer a question, help a customer or generally improve the situation, you should.
2. over-communicate. you’ll always make changes to your world or game for various reasons, like adding new features, balancing the game dynamics or whatever. whenever you do, someone will be upset. but more than people being upset, people will be uncertain about its impact on them. it might change their inventory, or affect their score or who knows what. any side-effects that you know (e.g. documented and proven through testing) you should post. you’ll answer a bunch of questions right off the bat and if it’s bad, you’ll get all the anger out right away rather than be ambushed by it later.
3. avoid talking like a politician. sanya weathers talks about the danger of talking like a marketing person, where you use buzzwords and build hype, regardless of what the actual situation is. talking like a politician is trying to get everyone to like you. you make promises and empty statements. this doesn’t help. again, back to point 1: as honest and open as possible.
4. stop and think before hitting send or submit. ask yourself if what you’re about to write (and yes, any email, posting, etc is public) will help. will it help clear up a question? will it help make a customer happy? if not, re-work it until it does, or find a different message.
5. be among them, but not of them. a lot of people talk about the importance of developers playing games, and for the fun aspects, it makes a lot of sense. for community managers, who generally have to deal with upset customers, when you share their pain, you can represent them much better internally. after all, as a community manager, you represent the community to the developers and business interests. you can’t fight blindly for what would make you the player more successful in-game or in-world, but you can explain rationally what will help the majority of the community to be happier or more successful.

1. aside from speeding, expired registration and parking tickets, my only police problem was a citation and fine for illegal camping.
2. a police dog once held me in place by gripping my ankle. he didn’t bite – just held me in place. this was not really a problem, but a wild misunderstanding.
3. i spent 4 days alone backpacking in lapland. on 2 of those days i didn’t see another human.  i saw a fair number of reindeer, though.
4. two of my grandparents were from a part of finland that is now in russia.
5. i once poured a glass of water (might have been 2 or 3) for the dalai lama.

over on one of the blogs that i read, finland for thought, the author phil wrote up a list of his three biggest pet peeves. first of all, they cracked me up. second, i decided i might take the chance to list 3 of mine. i’m not sure if they’re the biggest three, but three nonetheless:

1. smoking in closed places. living in berlin, i take the u-bahn and s-bahn a lot. these are the local equivalents of the subway or metro. like most metro systems, it has a mix of underground and above-ground stations. smoking is prohibited in all underground stations, but people still do it all the time. in the outdoor stations, there are designated smoking areas, but these are almost 100% ignored. i also hate going to a bar or restaurant and coming out smelling like smoke, even when i try to sit as far away as possible and i don’t smoke.
2. rude public transportation behavior. actually, this goes for any transportation method, like airplanes and trains, too. but i hate when people deliberately put their bags on the seat to discourage anyone from sitting next to them. people also do things like take the aisle seat and try to block anyone from getting across to the window seat. it also bothers me when people don’t give up their seats to the elderly, disabled, pregnant women, etc when the cars are full.
3. public parent police. i really, really dislike when other people talk to my kids about their behavior in public. they’re my kids, and i will deal with them. i hate getting looks in restaurants if one of them talks loud or gets upset. i also don’t like people telling me how to handle my kids. it’s definitely different if it’s friends, but if i don’t know you, don’t talk to my kids or talk to me about how to handle them.

i’ve updated the about page on this site with more about me. it’s not quite a CV, but close to it.

the name metaremix isn’t the most obvious name, especially not for a site that is intended to be my personal site. so let me try to explain it. Continue reading »

so the first question that comes to mind in reading this blog is probaby “why”. as in, why yet another blog, why bother writing it, why bother reading it, etc. i won’t pretend that it’s for everybody, that much is clear to me. so what is this website? Continue reading »

so the blog is basically ready! first real posts coming today.

To-do list:

1. New theme
2. Widgets (partly done)
3. Plug-ins for spam, podcasting, polls, ShareThis
4. First few posts explaining this blog, comment policy, purpose, more about me, etc
5. Fix the permalink structure
6. credit the theme author, podpress, wordpress, others in the footer
7. write disclaimer
8. fix poll archive display

all of that next week!

To-do list:

1. New theme
2. Widgets (parltly done)
3. Plug-ins for spam, podcasting, polls, ShareThis
4. First few posts explaining this blog, comment policy, purpose, more about me, etc
5. Fix the permalink structure
6. credit the theme author, podpress, wordpress, others in the footer
7. write disclaimer
8. fix poll archive display

all of that next week!

this one hit me a while ago, so i’m posting my responses here for fun. i’m not tagging anyone.

1. i once got kicked off a train in the middle of sweden.
2. i saw someone i knew pull a gun on someone else that i knew.
3. i used to take language classes to bring up my g.p.a. in college.
4. i don’t really like upper-case letters. they just don’t serve much purpose in my eyes.
5. at some point or other, i have taught english, finnish, french and spanish.