Paper 3 - Cultural Artifact - Community

Introduction:

This third paper examines Online games as a Cultural Artifact, and how the communities revolve around them. It overviews the different aspects of online communities from competitive ones, to modding communities and the like.

It fits well with the theme of the blog as much of the essence of a video game and its life are the communities. Games live on through their communities, just as music and movies live on through their fans. I myself am a part of many different communities, and that has helped me observe how they affect things like various other forms of media and entertainment.

Personally, I don't think the entertainment medium would be where it is today without online games. They are a huge market nowadays and without them entertainment would probably not have changed nearly as much as it did. Entertainment in general is probably just as changed now as it was when movies were created.

Online Games:

Online gaming communities have been around since the 90s, and throughout their history, the games behind them have helped build and shape the many existing communities for them. The communities are also crucial to a game's existence, sometimes they even extend the life of a game and its longevity far beyond the games visual fidelity, but the games and the developers who make them help form these communities, whether on purpose or inadvertently. These communities usually explore the different possibilities of a game when it first comes out, with players trying to find out everything there is to know, or in the case of competitive multiplayer games, discovering new strategies, tactics, and learning their way around the “levels”, or arenas, to find the best way to destroy their competition.

Like many other items, A game's creation and unveiling, as well as their communities make up a sort

of life cycle that repeats itself. Understanding that cycle helps us understand their coherence and link

to each other.

My first real encounter with a community as described above, was the first one I became a part
of, for a game called Crysis on a site called Crymod, which I had joined around 2007. I'd
seen discussion boards and forums before, but never actually used any of them until I joined that
particular one. It was a place where all the people who liked the game would come together
and talk about it, plan matches together, or just talk about other general topics. But the biggest part of it by far was the modding. “Modding” is simply modifying a game in some way, whether it be by adding new levels, weapons, characters, visual effects, etc. It's sort of like an insight into game development, except usually done in peoples spare time. As the name of the site implies, the developers of the game set it up, and gave the tools to their customers to make all different kinds of custom content. The tools were designed to be user-friendly, and because of them the game is still alive even after its sequel has been released. This sort of “player-development” where the players do the same thing the developers had done is a vital part of a great many communities, and has kept many of them around longer than you would ever expect. Doom, Quake, and Half-Life are all games that came out in the 90s, but are still alive today because of their dedicated fanbase that creates new things with them. This is all thanks to the developers taking the time to create tools to work on the game with, and then release them as part of a game (this is something a lot more games are lacking in nowadays).

Games are not just about modding though, which usually takes a back seat to this next feature.

One of the aspects of games that many users gravitate towards is the competitive online play. While the idea of competitive multiplayer was first created by the company ID software with Doom, their next game, Quake, is credited as widely popularizing the multiplayer portion on a much larger scale over the internet, instead of limiting players to just playing with friends. Some popular programs that allow you to chat with your friends easily were made specifically for Quake, and evolved from that into something more diverse. Despite all of these advancements, the internet was still relatively new, and most of the Quake players were hardcore gamers, due to the nature of the complexity of setting up

and getting into matches, though there still were a lot of players.

Much of the community at the time was organized into clans, teams that would compete with

each other towards different goals, like prizes, titles, or just flat out being the best at a game. The first

game to really take online gaming to the mainstream, instead of just the hardcore, was Unreal

Tournament. It gave players a simple interface, practice modes, and a very polished experience that was easily accessible by many, yet allowed many hardcore players to excel in as well, as a sort of easy to learn, but hard to master approach. It created a huge following and many events with tournaments for prizes and the like (although Quake had many tournaments as well). In addition to that, the style of play was very different from something like Quake, and it also created a split in the type of play-styles each community had, making each one's members pretty different from each other – despite the two being similar games. It also was one of the most extensively modify-able games of the time, which had become a staple of the franchise even today, as the developers released a free version of their engine where anyone can make games out of it.

Today gaming has become a very wide-spread, mainstream form of entertainment and
competition, going as far as being recognized as actual sports in some countries like Korea. (Though a sport is inherently defined as physical activity so that is contradictory by nature, as gaming is mostly mental activity) The communities for games like Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Gears of War (Gears is actually made by the creators of Unreal Tournament) are huge, and with the introduction of

consoles into the mix as serious gaming platforms, as well as the PC becoming a much easier gaming platform to work with and be an active part of a community than ever before, the impact has been substantial.

What started as a simple, almost experimental medium that started to grow with the original
Quake in the late 90s is now an integral part of every game that is released. In the early days, people
would host sites and boards to gather and talk about the games, or create their own programs to serve those purposes – nowadays, we have services like Xbox Live, Steam, and Playstation Network
for Xbox, PC, and PS3 respectively that fill in those roles. They give us boards to post on and discuss
different games – allow us to add friends from people we play with, voice chat with them, and a lot
more. If a competitive game was lacking any of these, people probably wouldn't even consider buying
it. In modern game development it seems notable that gamers take a more active roll in the
development process then ever before. Developers put polls on Facebook to ask fans what features they want to see in a game, or what they should change and add, sites like twitter allow players to talk directly to the companies, and in (some) cases, the game is shaped by decisions that the community made, or designs that the fans chose or submitted in contests or other events.

The life cycle of a game is a very crucial part to them, and is almost always defined by the

community behind it. The games get announced, people find info, pictures, and videos from different

sources, and they become interested. They usually then find a site to sign up to, whether it be to the

official site, or some free forums. People speculate on the game for a long time up until release day,

talking about their excitement and what they hope they can do in the game, as well as create rumors

about things that you probably can never do. The community will usually go strong for a long time

(this is riding on the assumption that the game is enjoyable, of course), with modding (if it supports it)

extending the community for a much longer time, as when people are bored of the stock game they

change it. The Battlefield series is a perfect example of this, as Battlefield 3 is a sequel to Battlefield 2, which has been around since 2005 and is still widely played today, which is very much due to the

various modifications that have been created for it. Of course there is the final stages of the life cycle of a community, which effects most games very hard, where the game just becomes stale, and most people get tired of playing it. The number of players dwindles, and the communities get smaller. This is usually done by a sequel to a game, if it improves on the old one enough. Eventually the game becomes almost completely dead, with maybe one or two communities still holding on, and nobody really plays anymore except for maybe some nostalgic value. There have been some that break this mold though, such as some of the first successful games like Doom or Quake still have fairly strong followings, but that can also be attributed to the large amount of work done to them to fix problems and add features to them.

The fact of the matter still stands, and that is that these games are all their own culture artifacts,
As with each new one that's created, a new fanbase will always spring up. It's a pretty simple symbiotic relationship in nature – the developers make the games, and the players play them. Without the developers, the players would not be able to play the games, and without the players, the developers would have no one to develop the games for.