These community roles are based on David Unruh's (1983) typology of member's degree of involvement in and commitment to a voluntary (vague) community.

Community Roles Typology

• Insiders are those few persons who have power to redirect goals and change things in the community.
• Regulars are the main body of the community. People who observe the community's informal and formal rules.
• Tourists are just visiting. They are interested to see what is happening in the community, but they do not get involved in those activities. Since they are not stakeholders, they don't care if things go wrong in the community. In some cases they are newbies.
• Strangers are outsiders, those who know nothing of the habits of the community.

Unlike other types in this typology, the Stranger is mostly a discoursive type. That is, community itself (or, perhaps the Insiders) creates - usually negative - gestalts of an outer enemy or non-wanted inside members (peelos in Habbo, for example) that should be excluded. A lurker is also a good example. If the community (the insiders, or the majority anyway) takes the lurkers as selfish free-riders, lurkers are discussed as strangers. However, if lurkers are taken as potentially active members, or at least elementary parts of the critical mass enabling the viability of the community, they might be handled as tourists or even regulars.

For an application of this typology in our case studies, see Describing User Groups.

The level of personal involvement is here thought to be a mid-level "community dimension".

Considering the whole community model's structure, Unruh's typology talks about a person's social role that categorises that person's social identity, or, as we would call it here, a community role. For more sociologically oriented readers it should be mentioned that Unruh is an example of a slightly broader meaning and shorter definition of social world than Strauss.

In Unruh's social world

• membership is voluntary
• presence/absence cannot be realized
• because of/enabled by communication media there are no strict geographical borders
• identification is purely cognitive (the membership is in your own head)
• it is an easy access to the social world
• there is relatively weak structure of power

Thinking of this typology's abstraction level, it could be located between the larger social frames (social world perspectives, describing the community level phenomena) and more situation-related contexts dealing with social experiences from a social angle. In practice, the typology contributes to the whole community model by helping to describe some kind of seniority-based social positions and orbiting processes (careers and other development paths) in the community from an individual's point of view - and in some cases even from a group's point of view.

Mostly a particular type in the typology describes, or, hints to, the social identity of the player at the moment and his or her history considering the particular community at hand. The type is not a role in the sense that could be taken as, say, one's avatar's gender. Of course these social identity terms are not offered to players as categorizing labels but improving the designer's understandings of possible social roles among players. However, the typology describes roles in the sense that the member's personal knowledge, skills, experience of, and commitment to the community highly causes the role s/he is given to.