Communities of practice are groups of people sharing a common concern or interest for something they do or are learning how to do better as they interact with each other (Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner, 2015). These communities can be born by people naturally interacting with each other or they can be sparked by an organiser. A good example of the latter is Stack Exchange - a network of websites devoted to different topics allowing people to ask and answer questions. Such websites gather people of common practice and create new communities.

Communities of practice are sometimes encouraged by an employer. Spotify's company model defines them with the name Guilds (Cruth, n.d.). While they can be around interest, my experience shows that most guilds within a company are communities of practice and present a great opportunity to share work and to evangelise new practices to a wide range of teams.

Why join them?

The main benefit one can get from joining a community of practice can be found in the definition itself - gaining more knowledge. Of course, it won't be one-sided, when a person is in a community they get the opportunity to share their experience and knowledge contributing to the community. This introduces another benefit - expanding one's network and getting noticed. It is vital for indie developers to have large networks to support them throughout the length of their projects.

Another vital benefit to indie developers is motivation. Seeing other developers showcase their work is a very strong motivator which is highly valuable during the long development process for a game (Freeman and McNeese, 2019).

Lastly, as an indie game developer, I won't be able to do everything myself. Communities of practice present an excellent platform to look for collaborators as any previous interaction with the members would highlight who are the most suitable members for the project.

Communities I am part of

With more than five years of professional experience, I am not new to the concept of communities of practice. I am participating in the Lean Agile Glasgow and the Cloud Native Glasgow communities. Both organise regular meetups where participants get to network, discuss different topics and showcase their work.

Image from Lean Agile Glasgow's page on MeetUp

I have also been a part of the Stack Overflow community, however, so far I've been focusing on learning and voting rather than contributing with questions and answers. I find large online communities to be very daunting to join and often that discourages me. This is something I plan to work on, as in the new post-COVID world more and more communities will be moving online.

Communities to join

The above benefits are extremely valuable to me as a newbie in the indie game development community. Firstly, I have joined the Game Developers League Discord server which is a community of game developers providing support and sharing knowledge with one another. It is a very active community and because it is hosted in a chat platform it is very quick and easy to get feedback and ask a question. Additionally, this makes it extremely easy for a new member to join and participate in the community. Secondly, I am going to participate in the /r/gamedev subreddit on Reddit. This is another community where a person can find a lot of inspiration and motivation from the work and experiences of other people. While harder to join, this community provides a place to share thoughts, experiences and work in a way that is persistent and would be seen by significantly more people.

I will need to do further research into communities that are specific to indie game development, however, the two I've chosen so far would give me the most of the benefits I need in the short term.

Networking

Networking is not my strong suit. While I can easily strike a conversation with new people, I usually fail at maintaining the connection by exchanging details.

One of the most common pieces of advice I hear is to find a person who is good at networking and focus on making them part of my network. They can then help with expanding my network further. They can also work as a mentor or a teacher on how to approach networking.

I will focus on expanding my networking skills during my indie game development journey. I am hoping the communities I have and will be joining will provide me with the opportunities to learn and practice.

Analysing a community

Since I have joined the Game Developers League community on Discord, I wanted to take a deeper look at it and see if I can identify the key aspects of the community.

Image from #welcome channel in the Game Developers League Discord server

The community consists of over 50,000 developers, seeking or providing support to each other. They communicate using fairly informal language, however, there are rules which are followed rigorously. The most notable ones are around behaviour (no tolerance to any kind of harassment) and around helping each other - never to assume one game engine or tool is better than the other and keeping discussions on-topic without any politics or religious discussions.

The moderation of the community follows the self-moderating pattern utilised by StackExchange - members can award karma to those who have helped them or contributed to the community. The process is managed by a group of moderators that ensure the self-moderation system is not abused and handle any other matters.

The community has a dedicated #events channel where members can share any relevant events with each other. During my membership so far I have not seen any official events.

References

Cruth, M., n.d. The Spotify model. [online] Atlassian. Available at: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/agile-at-scale/spotify [Accessed 28 March 2021].

Freeman, G. and McNeese, N.J., 2019. Exploring indie game development: Team practices and social experiences in A creativity-centric technology community. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 28(3), pp.723-748.

Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B., 2015. Introduction to communities of practice. [online] Wenger-trayner.com. Available at: https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/ [Accessed 28 March 2021].