The Community's Sparck of Life

Having recently joined the KingsIsle team, Mathew is the newest Community Manager for its games. He'll help you get to know him and talk a little bit about how the Wizard101 community is unique and what ideas he has as we move forward.

I’ve been a community manager for over a decade now and can safely say that the Wizard101 community is one of the most interactive and fun I’ve ever had the pleasure to be a part of. In just the short time that I’ve been at KingsIsle, I’ve seen amazing talent in the community on both the leadership and artistic fronts. There’s definitely something special about what you have built together over the years!

While our team has tons of content to share yet with you, we really want to keep the theme of "by the community, for the community". I encourage anyone that has something to share to please let the team know. It will be easy for us to help get the word out about your events and other activities if it’s something we can promote well in advance.

There’s so much potential in the community, it’s got me dizzy with excitement. One of the goals I had the day I arrived at KingsIsle Entertainment was to start sharing more of your content with the rest of the community on our official social media channels. This has mainly been through retweeting posts on Twitter, as well as including community announcements in the newsletters. I also want to share more of your creative content on the monthly KI Live’s.

It’s also important that you all know that we are always paying attention to your gameplay feedback. Not a day goes by where we don't discuss something the community has a concern about, or a cool idea a player proposed. I know that at times it may feel like we’re not always noticing your feedback, but I can assure you that we do pay attention, even if we don’t respond back right away.

A little bit about me away from community management, I’ve traveled the world, including teaching English in China. While the general food selection in cities I visited was quite interesting, my true love is for ice cream, but I think most of the community knows this by now :). Surprisingly, China has just as unique ice cream flavors (Lychee, Pandan, and Coconut) as over here in the states. I won’t ever miss the chance to visit an ice cream shop. If necessary, I’ll bike for miles to do so too, which is a hobby of mine (the biking part, though you could argue the hunt for ice cream part as well :).

I'm also a fan of shows like Star Trek, Stargate, and movies like Star Wars. I even met Data (Brent Spiner) and Worf (Michael Dorn) once at a tradeshow! I also have an inclination towards high fantasy films as well with an old classic being The Dark Crystal. Many on the team at KingsIsle also enjoy these stories, which in part is how some of the worlds of the Spiral came to be. The cool thing about being a gamer is it lets us explore all of the possibilities and even impossibilities right in our own virtual worlds, and there's certainly plenty of potential in the worlds of the Spiral.

Since I’m still new to the community, please feel free to reach out to me and ask any questions you have about how I manage communities, what I have been working on with our community, or anything else! Especially if you propose a new event or other initiative that we can plan toward; we can see about making it happen together.

I look forward to working with all of you in the years ahead!

Sparck, Senior Community Manager 

Thanks to Mathew for this post!

Thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!