ABSTRACT

Communities of practice (COPs) have become increasingly important across a wide range of casual and business contexts, including innovative technical product development, refining skill sets for competitions, or establishing corporate strategies. Members of such communities forge interpersonal relationships and develop sophisticated practices around a shared domain, either interdependently contributing to a joint product or advancing as individuals. However, prior research has not examined attempts to sustain a COP whose domain has been terminated. Such cases have become increasingly common, especially as COPs emerge around ephemeral media products such as mobile games. A recent example, Tales of Link, based on the popular ‘Tales of’ Japanese role-playing game series, shut down on March 2018, but members of the subreddit devoted to it have attempted to keep the community active. As such, a computational text analysis of 33,476 comments and 1,000 posts on the r/talesoflink subreddit was conducted to assess how community members attempt to sustain COPs beyond the lifespan of their original domains. The findings offer insight into the discourse within COPs, the strategies and success rates of survival that may vary by such organisations, conversations surrounding the ever-changing gacha game model, and the potential changes in members’ messages and behaviours.

摘要

实践社区 (COP) 在各种休闲和商业环境中变得越来越重要，包括创新技术产品开发、改进竞赛技能组合或制定公司战略。这些社区的成员围绕共享领域建立人际关系并发展复杂的实践，或者相互依存地为联合产品做出贡献，或者作为个人进步。然而，先前的研究没有检查维持域已终止的 COP 的尝试。这种情况变得越来越普遍，尤其是当 COP 出现在手机游戏等临时媒体产品周围时。最近的一个例子，链接的故事，基于流行的“Tales of”日本角色扮演游戏系列，于 2018 年 3 月关闭，但致力于它的 subreddit 的成员试图保持社区活跃。因此，对 r/talesoflink subreddit 上的 33,476 条评论和 1,000 条帖子进行了计算文本分析，以评估社区成员如何尝试在其原始域的生命周期之外维持 COP。这些发现提供了对 COP 内部讨论、此类组织可能不同的生存策略和成功率、围绕不断变化的gacha游戏模型的对话以及成员信息和行为的潜在变化的洞察。