A Sense of the Virtual – Virtual Communities and On-line Game Cultures

With the advancement of technology, people realized that they were able to communicate through their computers via the electronic email, conduct business, have chit-chat sessions with people all over the world via online chat rooms, and instant chat programs like ICQ, MSN, AOL; games were also played online, from text-based on-line games hosted by Bulletin Board Services in the 1980s, to MUDS (Multi-User Dungeons), to visually stunning on-line games like Ultima Online, and Final Fantasy XI. These games enabled interactions between players, similar to a chat room environment, except that there was a goal or a quest to be attained. Players are able to form alliances, foster relationships with other players, or wage wars with them.

Let’s explore the origins of this virtual gaming environment or community, before we go further.

Just as electricity was greeted with a big hurrah at its initial disclosure during the enlightened era, the first ‘quantum flicker’ in Margaret Wertheim’s words, of cyber-creation was traced to California in 1969. (Wertheim, 1999: 224) The invention of the ARPANET, through the funding of the U.S. Department of Defence, sparked the beginning of cyberspace. (Ibid) With its initial task of linking two computers, one at UCLA, and the other at the Stanford Research Institute, for research and information exchange purposes; computer nodes started to grow, and by August 1972, there were twenty-nine nodes located in universities and research centres in the United States. (Wertheim, 1999: 225)

Due to its origins in the Defence Department, access was not freely granted. With increased calls for a civilian network, the National Science Foundation in 1980 decided to sponsor a network to connect the other science departments in the country (CSNET). (Ibid) In the eighties, other networks were linked with ARPANET and the formulation of a standardized set of procedures that would allow different networks to communicate was called an ‘Internet Protocol’; from which the Internet was accorded its name. (Ibid) With the success of CSNET, the National Science Foundation built a backup network to serve a series of regional networks linking other universities in the country. This NSFNET soon became the Internet. (Ibid)

In the eighties, the advent of Bulletin Board Systems allowed mainframe UNIX jockeys to trade technical tips. (Davis, 1998: 166) It was only when people started to log on from personal computers to dial up to these Bulletin Board Systems, that these ‘computer mediated conversations blossomed into the “Virtual Communities” and “grassroots group minds” described by Howard Rheingold.’ (Ibid) With the installation of the WELL – the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, in 1985 by Steward Brand, it became the earliest Bulletin Board System, and this allowed communities to form, with posts to facilitate the exchange of information in forums. (Ibid.) The earliest fan site was situated in the WELL, formed by die-hard fans of the Grateful Dead. Such a ‘magical’ creation of a virtual community would have Hermes Trismegistus chuckling in his ethereal abode, for Davis remarked that
Hermes Trismegistus reminds us, technology operates as easily in a magical universe as a rational one; indeed, from the perspective of cultural narratives and political power, technology often functions as magic.’ (Davis, 1998: 172)

The beauty of an on-line game lies in the fact that you can play it anytime you like, and you would not have to make phone calls and plead with your friends to take time off from their busy schedules to engage in a virtual battle with you. As on-line pioneer Howard Rheingold wrote,
“While you can’t simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a three-year-old daughter or a forty-year old Hudson, you can however, join a computer conference on any of these topics.” (Rheingold, 1996)

Thus, you can log on into a game server, at any time of the day or night, at your whim or fancy, and engage in a virtual battle with monsters, with or against other players, regardless of spatial location. There is even an entire community of users, who build new architectural ‘levels’ for these online games so that the pre-programmed game package doesn’t end at a specific level. (Bolter & Grusin, 1999: 103) Bolter & Grusin in their book Remediation noted that games such as DOOM and Quake Arena allow such authors to come together, and forge a community; which is ‘an implied improvement over traditional cinema, in which the viewers cannot reshape or add to the narrative structure. Networked games make a claim to improve on the social practice not only of other computer games, but of television and film as well.’ (Ibid)

While television and film, constitute an ‘imagined’ community in Benedict Anderson’s reckoning, Games Studies theorist Espen Aarseth elaborated that
‘the mass media communities remained imagined… with little or no direct communication between participants. Clearly, multi-player games are not like that. In games like MUD, Ultima Online, or Quake Arena, the aesthetic and the social are integrated parts, and this could be regarded as the greatest innovation in audience structure since the invention of the choir, thousands of years ago.
(Aarseth, 2001)

Thus, the notion of a community coming together, for a specific goal or purpose, can be seen when technology allows users to play a computer game on-line, thus forging a social dimension in these computer games. An on-line computer game culture or a virtual community is formed, as in the instance of DOOM mentioned above. This virtual computer game culture also strengthens the notion of community, for the social interaction function (or on-line messages) that is embedded in the computer game, allows users to build a sense of Gemeinschaft-ian camaraderie depending on whether they’re in the same team, for example, or in an overall sense – the notion that there is a group of people engaged in a similar game, itself builds and reinforces the notion of the community. Thus, Bolter & Grusin noted that

‘The Internet promises to assimilate the social space of gaming to the space of MUDs and MOOs, as computer games connected to the network can serve as sites for “virtual communities.”
(Bolter & Grusin, 1999: 103)