Despite how prevalent the internet has become in terms of how we communicate with others, the study of online community building is still fairly new. Online communities have become more and more prevalent in the last thirty years or so, and people have adapted it into their lives at a startlingly fast rate. Just look at how prevalent social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have become in our daily lives. These sites only started to gain popularity about fourteen years ago and yet they have so engrained themselves into our daily lives that according to Nidhi Subbaraman, the average smartphone user checks their Facebook timeline 14 times a day (Subbaraman, 2013). These social media platforms have made it easier than ever for new communities to form by connecting users who have a common interest and it is important to see how this change in how people communicate, and form relationships is changing as a result of the integration of technology. This development has allowed for much more diverse and wide spread communities to develop in situations where people would normally have never come together. New communities are springing up all the time on this medium, many of which are built around a specific subject or demographic. This has especially been the case regarding communities centered around video games such as those that were developed on Nintendo's Miiverse.
The goal of this project is to see what elements of the Miiverse made it stand out and to understand what was lost when it was shut down. Over the course of the project I will explain exactly what the Miiverse is, who used it, what killed it, what is being lost and the Miiverse's affect on the gaming community as a whole. My theses going into this project is that all communities, no matter how small or fringe they are, have something of value that makes them unique. By studying these communities, we can learn if these traits that make individual communities are positive or negative, and by doing so, we can then try to adapt these traits into other communities.
Gaming communities are particularly interesting because these groups have formed around a very specific shared interest, the game. This shared interest allows all members of the group to have some common ground when it comes to forming relationships among individuals or having group discussions. For instance, if you go to the Mario Subreddit, a forum centered specifically around Mario games hosted by the website Reddit, you can pretty much guarantee that almost everyone in the group has played at least one level of a Mario game.