Introduction

With imagination, scenarios like the above can be conjured while playing a text-based on-line game called Trade Wars. This, coupled with on-line interactions that sometimes even take place outside the game space. Corporations are formed, and wars are fought in unison or against each other, with double-dealings thrown in for good measure. Friendships are formed, regardless of physical attributes, and it becomes a level playing field of sorts. The ability to incorporate on-line conversations allows a sense of camaraderie to develop. The politics of everyday life can also be incorporated in the virtual world of computer games.

This sense of virtual community, where people log on to actively participate in a game of common interest, is a remediation, of sorts, of the community that occurs in real life. Bolter & Grusin define remediation as ‘to take a “property” from one medium and reuse it in another’ or ‘the representation of one medium in another’, usually to improve on the previous medium to make it better or in some context, to achieve a sense of immediacy (where the medium seems to be absent), through hypermediacy (by means of an enhanced collaboration of other forms of media). (Bolter & Grusin, 1999: 45) This is also known as the double logic of remediation. Just as the gaming community is remediated into the virtual environment leading to a sense of immediacy, via on-line gaming, the virtual gaming environment also leads to the formation of communities outside the on-line sphere.

This paper will explore the ways in which a community has an impact on game cultures, and how this relationship can occur in reverse fashion, i.e., vice versa; partially refuting the term 'technological determinism' – in which technology has caused society to shape itself around it, leading to a passive reception of technology; apparently first coined by the American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). (Chandler, 2002) The games used for analysis will be the early Bulletin Board System game Trade Wars, and for a more contemporary application, the up-and-coming Matrix Online.