The Community Manager Who Teaches You How to Survive Your Own Fandom
The Unlikely Path to Professional Boundary-Setting
Davis didn't set out to become a community manager. With a background in communication and triple minors in creative writing, art, and pop culture, she bounced through jobs as a distillery tour guide, a screen printing project manager, and an instructional designer before finding her way into gaming.
"I joined a Discord for a game studio that I liked a lot. I liked the stuff that they made and I just took a big investment in their work," she recalls. The studio eventually made her a moderator, and when a job opened up, she asked: "What about me?"
This unconventional path is more common than you might think in community management. "People come from all sorts of backgrounds, and then connections are a really great way to get put in a place that allows you to succeed," Davis notes. The role demands social soft skills that translate across industries — something traditional career paths often miss.
Bria worked on building community for Blaseball, a self-described “baseball simulation horror game.”
Why Gaming Communities Are Different (And What That Teaches Us)
Gaming has something that no other entertainment medium can claim: two massive platforms — Twitch and Discord — that grew primarily to serve its communities. While there are other communities spaces like Letterboxd for film, the scale of Discord and Twitch is unmatched.
This infrastructure creates distinct community dynamics:
Twitch operates on a content creator/fan relationship model, where "there's a sense of authority" with the person on camera. It's live, participatory, and creates what sociologists call "parasocial dynamics" — where viewers project relationships onto streamers they don't actually know.
Discord functions more like "a bunch of people in a room," Davis says, with interpersonal dynamics between users rather than creator-to-audience relationships. "The mods are there, but the dynamic is interpersonal between individual users and their ability to social influence and how engaging they are."
These different structures require different community management approaches — a lesson that applies far beyond gaming.
The Fandom Lifecycle: Understanding How Communities Form (And Sometimes Implode)
Davis breaks down how fandoms develop in ways that challenge conventional wisdom about community building:
Initial Consumption: Someone plays a game and thinks, "This is cool. I want some more of this."
Community Seeking: They find others interested in the same thing, usually on centralized platforms.
Power Dynamics Emerge: Natural social hierarchies form. "I am talking with this person, and I know more about this than they so I want to share that with them.
Norm Setting: Those with the most social capital set conversation topics and community standards.
Enforcement: New members either conform to these norms, accumulate enough power to change them, or leave.
This progression reveals a counterintuitive truth: "I think a lot of people don't realize that fandom can actually limit your potential for growth," Davis warns. The very intensity that makes fandoms valuable can also make them insular and resistant to new members.
The "Intimate Public" Problem: When Shared Interests Don't Equal Shared Values
Drawing on theorist Lauren Berlant's work, Davis introduces a concept that explains many community management disasters: the intimate public.
"If you and I both go and see The Avengers movie and we leave and we're like, 'That was so fun. Iron Man is so cool,' we would feel like we are a part of a community together," Davis explains. "But we may have very different values about how we engage with the world."
This creates a powder keg situation. When you introduce changes that touch on values, communities can explode because members assume their shared consumption meant shared beliefs.
University of Chicago professor Lauren Berlant, who passed away in 2021, defined important fields within queer theory, specifically affect theory—a way of categorizing and describing emotions—and how our pop culture impacts our feelings.
The Art of Professional Boundary-Setting
"One of the things that I tell people my job is is just professionally setting boundaries," Davis says. It's a deceptively simple description of incredibly complex work.
Consider this example: If a you create a Discord channel simply labeled "memes," someone will inevitably post "an extremely inappropriate offensive, potentially not safe for work meme" because they think it's funny. Now you face a dilemma: leave it up and appear to endorse it, or delete it and face accusations of censorship.
Davis's solution is strategic channel design. Instead of a generic "memes" channel, create something specific like "show us pictures of yourself in weird environments.." The constraint naturally filters content while maintaining engagement.
The Beginner's Guide to Gaming Community Engagement
For people entering gaming spaces for the first time, Davis offers practical advice:
Start with Clear Focus: "Going in with a clear focus on what you want to accomplish and what you want to facilitate" is essential. The more channels and conversation types you host, the more moderation work you create.
Design for Easy Engagement: Create "easy low-stakes ways for people to participate" that relate directly to your purpose.
Pay Your Moderators: "You're gonna get much better moderation if you pay your moderation team. You should do that."
The Future of Gaming Communities
As more people attempt to cultivate fandom-level engagement, Davis's insights become increasingly relevant. The lesson isn't to avoid building communities — it's to approach them with the respect and resources they require.
"Fandom comes from like a deep emotional connection to a character, to a story, or to a version of the world where you can see your place as something different than it is," Davis explains. "It's escapism, it's self-actualization, it's identity exploration, and it's connection."
The people that succeed won't be those that try to manufacture these connections, but those that create genuine spaces for them to develop — and have the community management infrastructure to handle what emerges from those depths.
As Davis puts it: "When people see how much you care about the product, they start to care about it more, too." But caring isn't enough. You also need to know how to swim.
