Digital Communities x Collaborative Storytelling

Abstract

All virtual spaces are driven by the people who reside within them, from the way the architecture is constructed and rearranged to the way people choose to inhabit and utilize these spaces. Although the methods of communication, the concept of identity, and the persistence of these digital spaces differ from their physical counterparts, how they should be designed and inhabited remains an inevitable question. In this thesis, I perform an ethnographic inquiry into a virtual roleplay community situated on the text and voice-chat program, Discord. My goal with this research was to provide insight into a niche corner of Internet communities, understand the affordances of the program and how they were utilized, and finally understand how these implements allowed the community to develop their own culture and succeed. By engaging with member activities within the virtual community, I documented my insights within the following scaffold: the members, their creations, the Discord platform, and the member-arranged server architecture. In my analysis, I sought to understand the relationships that emerged between the constraints of the platform, how users utilized these constraints, and how they interacted with one another, eventually proposing this virtual community’s process as one way to design a digital space for a creative community.