So I’ve been doing research for a chapter on social and informal learning that I’m adding the second edition, and I’ve been taking a look at some of the resources on social gaming because they know a *lot* about community development. This is collection of some of the best resources I’ve found.

Core Concepts for Social Experience Design

This is such great stuff.  I know it’s labelled as Gamification, but the fabulous Amy Jo Kim deals primarily with social experience design, and the part about looking at the action verbs for different player types is pure gold.

Social Difficulty Curve

The always excellent Extra Credit folks did a series on the social difficulty curve — basically, how do you ease players into online social game interaction.  This dovetails well with Amy Jo Kim’s player’s journey as well:

These are part of Extra Credits playlist on game design, which if you are interested in game design at all, is just a treasure trove of goodness for learning about game design.

Community Development

It’s not a game design resource, but Tom Kuhlmann and his team run one of the best learning communities on the web.  Regardless of whether or not you are an Articulate or Storyline user, http://www.elearningheroes.com  is great resource of helping for people who build elearning.

In this series of videos, you can see him explaining some of the motivation and strategies behind how they develop and grow that community.