Moo Tang Clan: in-game journalism?

Monday, May 4, 2009

in-game journalism?

A passing thought - instead of recruiting community management personnel to patrol the forums, hire some budding journalists to hang out in your game writing up daily dispatches. Get several in game, put them on various beats, and make their reports available in-game as well as out.

Beats could include various raid dungeons, being embedded with an attack force assaulting Wintergrasp, a suitable bimbo reporting on the AH shenanigans, some wheezy old geezer hanging about the starting zone, and so on. You probably couldn't afford to have people permanently posted everywhere, some would have to be roving reporters.

If the in-game element had a decent UI then this could become quite popular. The UI should include capability for decently sized graphics like screen-shots. They could be supported in-game by criers walking about shouting the headlines and directing those interested to the nearest inn at an appointed time.

This is a more proactive design to community management, and with a deft hand at the editorial tiller could be used steer the community in preferred directions (rather than frantically reacting to flamewars).

2 comments:

Verilazic said...

I have an alternative proposal: instead of hiring people IRL, hire people in game to report stories and things in their server. Then instead of paying them real money, pay them gold, depending on how many views their articles get. Perhaps create a whole WoW-News-Network, like a mini youtube inside WoW or the WoW forums, and again, reward gold depending on how much activity a given poster generates.

Though, I think the idea of rewarding gold would've worked better in vanilla WoW, back when gold was actually difficult to get. =/

Garumoo said...

Weave commission, creation, and rewards into the game itself?

The local leaders could offer a daily quest, with very basic rewards for turning in any old drivel and bigger rewards handed out for story of the day or story of the week. Rewards could be gold, tokens, and appropriate rep.

You'd still need human intervention in the process for content moderation processes though.