Social network analysis is an exciting and promising tool used for community management with online games. Can this also be applied to a DARWARS (Training Superiority) online training community? For example, will these communities be scale-free with "hub" users who disproportionately influence the training focus? How will these networks grow? We do not know, yet. But we do know that from the ongoing experiment of the online game world will come ideas and insights that will enable us to design and measure a DARWARS community.
DARWARS is a DARPA-funded effort to revolutionize training and increase military readiness by providing online practice combining a robust technical infrastructure with elements from computer-aided instruction, intelligent tutoring systems, and multiplayer games. The vision of DARWARS is to bring together trainees, trainers, subject matter experts across military echelons, geographic locations, as well as use-cases (training events, single participant after-hours, etc.) into an active community with different reinforcing interests: pedagogy, training, entertainment, and content creation. A challenge of DARWARS is to develop mutually supporting communities.
To forward our understanding of community, this paper will examine aspects of the online game world with which we expect our DARWARS community to share important properties. This paper will cite a number of illustrating lessons, related to community. In particular we will examine the content-creation role of community.