Pro-Am Gamer Community

Here's an example of a community of Pro-Am gamers who got together to create "cracks" to translate Japanese online computer games into English:

I was talking to an acquaintance this week who is an avid online gamer, and as we discussed Web 2.0 he related an interesting experience. This acquaintance is a big fan of the Japanese online game “Monster Hunter” which for years has had a huge following worldwide, and I’m told it was only released in the U.S. market just a few weeks ago. I’m told this game is so popular in Japan that there are eateries and lounges where that are geared especially for Monster Hunter gamers, where they can congregate to play this online game. To be able to play Monster Hunters in the U.S. this acquaintance joined a bulletin board where Pro-Ams trade notes and were eventually able to break and translate the game’s Japanese codes into English. This group or community of hackers rated their members based on their contributions; members earned “rep” (reputation) points that would be assigned to their accounts. Over the years the community came to rely more and more on the skill-set of a single member so that over time this member had accrued the greatest number of rep points. After a while though, this member would post fewer and fewer responses and eventually disappeared from the bulletin board altogether for long stretches of time, months and months at a time. As a result, other members who sought out this member for advice would begin to taunt the member and then to flame the member, and all this went on record on the bulletin board. Needless to say, bridges were burned, to put it mildly. With every new revision of the Monster Hunter game, however, this member would leave a message and make his latest translation crack available to the group to review, consequently his member's rep points continue to exceed those of all the other members in the community.

As we discussed this, I asked my acquaintance what he thought the member’s motivation might be to go for long periods of time without responding. Without hesitation, he replied, “Status ”; Bruns calls it “merit” and ego-boo(st).