This is what happens when you write academic essays at 3 in the wee hours of the morning. And no Angela, i didn't write this at 3 in the morning on the due date. :-) 

Games Studies Final Assignment -

What impact do communities have on game cultures and vice versa? In your response, you should focus on the historical development of two on-line games and on how they have developed their versions of virtual communities


Captain’s log, star date, June 8th, 2016. Hermes system.

Here goes another routine day. We’re under orders from Uncle Sam, and on a buying spree for electronic equipment from the sector’s star port. It’s to equip and enable Uncle Sam to engage in the anti-establishment high jinks of robbing the port later. We’re building a stockpile at extravagant prices, allowing ourselves to be ripped off. But its no matter, Uncle Sam will get it all back. It’s for the good of our Corporation. No-body ever said we had to follow the books to get rich. Nobody does. I wasn’t paid to think either. ‘You’re a noob, so you don’t think. You just do!’ was Uncle Sam’s favourite phrase.
‘Ok haul them in, boys!’ I yelled as we made our last trade. The door of the cargo hold slammed shut, and as the 1st officer programmed the lock code, the intercoms blared.
‘Captain, you’ve been hailed. Your presence on the bridge is requested.’
I reported to the bridge. ‘About time you hauled your dingy little ass onto the bridge, boy.’ exclaimed Uncle Sam spewing his usual blood curdling venom which could only petrify a greenhorn sent on a simple assignments.
‘I have to make sure Federation codes of conduct were being adhered to, Commander.’ I said.
‘Ok, cut the crap. We’ve got a job to do. That rat’s ass, Phase, has been spotted in sector 6569 by our scouts. Since he’s gone to sleep for the night, he’s all yours, noobie.’ said Uncle Sam. ‘And remember to trade ships, and hop into the Interdictor Cruiser.’

That was my cue. This was it. I was going to make my first kill.

Bridge Of The Starship Enterprise. Screenshot for academic purposes only. Taken from http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/gallery/artoftrek/er-bridge-st2-2.jpg 

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.

Bolter & Grusin's book on Remediation.1999. I love this book. 

A Sense Of Community

Shawn P. Wilbur in his article ‘An Archaeology Of Cyberspaces’ defined community to seemingly refer to ‘relations of commonality between persons and objects, and only rather imprecisely to the site of such community.’ Rothaermel & Sugiyama pointed out that the term community was derived from the Latin root word communis. (2001: 298) Communis is formed by joining the words ‘cum: meaning together’ to ‘munus: meaning obligation, or (2) cum: meaning together and unus: meaning one.’ (Ibid)

They generalized that ‘thus, a community can be seen as a group in which individuals come together based on an obligation to one another or as a group in which individuals come together to be one in purpose.’ (Ibid)

German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies, one of the earliest researchers on community, provided further scrutiny of the term and drew a line between society and community. (Rothaermel & Sugiyama, 2001: 298) He defined Gemeinschaft (community) as ‘intimate, private and exclusively living together’, in contrast with the term Gesellschaft (society) which was associated with the ‘public life’, the world itself. (Ibid)

David Bell characterizes Gemeinschaft as a ‘total community: as fully integrated vertically and horizontally, as stable and long-lasting, as comprised of a dense web of social interaction supported by commonality and mutuality, manifest in shared rituals and symbols – as a local social contract embedded in place and made durable by face-to-face interactions.’
(Bell, 2001: 93)

This total community is equivalent to the communities in small rural cities where, to borrow from the theme song of the 1980s sitcom Cheers, ‘everyone knows your name’. A sense of kinship and closeness is formed in these closely-knit communities, and tight bonds of friendship are fostered. This is in contrast with Gesellschaft which refers to ‘association or society’, and refers to city folks, where relationships are ‘shallow and instrumental’ because of the size of the city, and urbanization and capitalism compel everyone to move along. (Bell, 2001: 94) One such Gesellschaft community Bell brings up is the nation, which Benedict Anderson terms as an ‘imagined community’. (Bell, 2001: 95) This means that a sense of nationalism is fostered through the use of symbols, resources and devices. We will probably not meet most of the people in the community, but we are reminded of our belonging to a community by symbols such as the national flag, the national anthem, the pledge, to name a few. Bell asserts that these communities exist, because the members acknowledge their existence, and belief in them; and these are ‘maintained through shared cultural practices’. (Bell, 2001: 95)

It is important to note that these ‘shared cultural practices’ resurface in virtual communities and in on-line game cultures, as we shall see later.

A Sense Of Community. used for academic purposes. Taken from http://www.rio-plus-10.org/bilder/johannesburg/communities%20with%20their%20statues%202.JPG 

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)

Online Pioneer Howard Rheingold, picture used for academic purposes. Taken from http://www.rheingold.com/index.html 

Quake Online- Used for Academic Purposes. Taken from http://cal.jmu.edu/zemliansky/firstyearwriting/online%20distractions/quake.jpg 

Ultima Online. Screenshot used for Academic Purposes. Taken From http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2000/09/026-mud/screenshot_ultima_online.png 

A Brief Look at MUDS and Trade Wars

MUDs or Multi User Dungeons and Dragons as it was originally termed, are complex fantasy worlds based on the role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons. (Wertheim, 1999: 234) It is a text-based game wherein the user navigates the game world created by programmers. Wertheim notes that various MUDs have been spawned and refashioned according to the programmer’s fancy. There is a Star Trek MUD called TrekMUSE, where MUDers can work their way to becoming a Star Ship captain. (Ibid) There is also DuneMUD, based on Frank Herbert’s book and series Dune, to name a few. Wertheim observes that ‘MUDing is quintessentially a communal activity in which players become integrally woven into the fabric of a virtual society… is sustained by the characters who populate it … [it is] a paradigmatic instance of the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace.’ ’ (Wertheim, 1999: 235)

This hallucination can be seen in an alternative form to MUDs, in the game Trade Wars which is programmed to run on Bulletin Board Systems, for online users.
John Pritchett, one of the later developing programmers for Trade Wars version(s) stated that its origins can be traced to the early 1970s, and even as it approaches its 34th anniversary of the release of the original version of the game, it is still being actively played today via Telnet. (Pritchett, 2003) Due to its nature as a BBS ‘door’ program, Trade Wars variants have often been ignored, in favour of the more popular MUD phenomenon, in the history of on-line games.

As the 17th century author John Donne observed, ‘No Man is an island’. ( The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. 2002 on ‘No Man is an island’) and being embroiled in the fury of Trade Wars should reinforce this notion. While one could venture out alone, you would probably run foul of members of other corporations who would likely gang up on you and put an end to your adventures. Rules and further details on how the game is played can be accessed at www.eisonline.com. Thus, for one’s safety, to identify oneself with a corporation is the smart thing to do.

During game play, it is not uncommon for two players or more to co-operate and destroy a certain corporation’s planet or home base. There were many occasions when I had to call upon my mentor of sorts, ‘Uncle Sam’ to walk me through the tactics required to disarm a corporation’s planet base, for example. Or there were instances when we deliberated on whose turn it was to take out the base(s) with the sacrifice of one’s ships and lives for the cause of galaxy domination. Sometimes these tactical planning even occurred outside the Trade Wars realm, and via the instant chat messenger ‘ICQ’.

Fans of Trade Wars have even started on-line forums and developed ‘scripts’ and ‘helpers’ to facilitate the mundane tasks of trading in Trade Wars credits, which are a financial instrument for transactions in commodities and star ship purchases, amongst other applications. These scripts allow the user to ‘auto-run’ certain procedures which would otherwise be laborious. Such as trading in, and colonizing, planets. It is interesting to note that during the early 1990s, when Trade Wars was played on Bulletin Board Systems, scripts were banned. And it was only during the last decade that their use was approved.

To reinforce this notion of a virtual community in Trade Wars, there is even a Trade Wars league ladder, where tournaments are held online, and the winning Corporation gets a prize in the form of a free software (usually a Trade Wars Helper) or scripts. And the scores are usually reflected on the league ladder/table, which is tabulated in conjunction/for comparison with other sites hosting their own Trade War games. Thus, reputation is broadcast on-line, and a sense of community is fostered, not to mention a spur to competition.

Trade Wars Screen Capture - My home sector with my planets. Aiding me and saving my hind, is Kasey, Uncle Sam's wife! She's docked for the night. 

Trade Wars Screen Capture - My information 

Trade Wars Screen Capture - How trading takes place 

Uncle Sam's left his fighters around as scouts. Attacking it to clear a path to Stardock 

Thursday, June 10, 2004


Trade Wars Screen Capture - Stardock Sector. Notice the online players who are currently offline, but decided to park themselves at the sector. Because players below a certain rank cannot be engaged in battle in the Stardock sector, which is Federation Space. Yes there are rules people!
 

Trade Wars Screen Capture - Landing at the Star Dock, where one gets equipment and supplies for your ship.  

Trade Wars Screen Capture - Buying a ticket to watch a movie at the Stardock. Note the ANSI graphics again. 

Trade Wars screen capture - A Virtual Cinema, with the audience taken into consideration. This happens when you choose to see a movie at the Stardock. 

Tradewars Screen Capture. This is a Ship Catalogue. Look at the cute ANSI graphic of the ship! 

Matrix Online

With the success of the Matrix series- both the movies and the computer games, it is not surprising to see Warner Bros. taking that extra step, to commission a Matrix Online. The Matrix Online features on-line interactivity in the world of the Matrix, which allows players to ‘jack in’ and interact with the world of the Matrix. How this added feature of on-line interactivity adds to the notion of community in the game here, is that it allows fans of the Matrix series to play out their Matrix fantasies in the virtual world with an added feature of interaction with other ‘jacked in’ players.

Already, before the game’s release, the hype generated has spawned numerous fan-sites, and its main website even has a forum up and running, so that discussions can be made regarding certain interfaces in the game. The main commodity in the game is information, and this requires players to source for the leaked information in the matrix environment, which allows them to trade this information with other players. But true to its nature, such ‘snoopers’ as the website terms it, will be hunted down and eliminated. The main website for the Matrix Online can be accessed via http://thematrixonline.warnerbros.com/web/index.jsp.

Thus, the revolution in on-line gaming now incorporates graphically stunning interfaces, and doesn’t require you to use your imagination as with text-based on-line games like MUDs and Trade Wars. However, the two variants of on-line games serve a purpose, which is to foster a sense of virtual gaming community - a virtual game culture, and in turn, this real life community of gamers is affected by the events in the on-line games.

Some interesting events which have happened, through my interactions with some of these Trade War players, is that some meet their wives through playing Trade Wars. One player shared that when he realized he had been destroyed by a crafty female player, he had to meet his female ‘killer’. After they had met, they fostered a relationship, and eventually got married. Such a real life example, shows how powerful the influence of the virtual game culture, can transcend into real life

This paper has looked at the various ways in which community and the definition of community has evolved to immerse itself in the world of cyberspace. Interactions like electronic mail, on-line chat rooms, and on-line games have remediated, according to Bolter & Grusin’s definition, the community into a virtual community, bringing a sense of immediacy to the interaction, regardless of space and time. In turn, with the interaction of these on-line game communities, our real life notion of community changes with the interactions that take place in the on-line world. In the foreseeable future, perhaps Virtual Reality sets will be implanted to remediate this experience of game play, and perhaps then, we can live in our on-line game worlds, and not have to contend with our existence in the material world with its dismal political climate of despair, disappointments and doom.

Beam me up Scotty.

Matrix Online illustration, taken from http://thematrixonline.warnerbros.com 

Matrix Online Main Page Picture, taken from http://thematrixonline.warnerbros.com 

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