Online Gaming in Context

The social and cultural significance of online games

Garry Crawford, Victoria K Gosling, Ben Light, Garry Crawford, Victoria K Gosling, Ben Light

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135275044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet.

This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

Part I Introduction

1 The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Gaming

Garry Crawford, Victoria K. Gosling and Ben Light

DOI: 10.4324/9780203869598-2

The chapters in this book cover scholarship on a wide range of subjects such as communities, empowerment, consumption, game aesthetics and forms, identities, language, productivity and patterns of exclusion, by authors from a number of fields including communication studies, English, media studies, game studies, journalism, informatics, religious studies, sociology and visual culture. The uniting theme is, of course, online games and their game play.

Online games, i.e. games (and most typically what we would term ‘video games’) played on or over an Internet connection, have, in a relatively short period, become a significant cultural phenomenon. The most obvious, and frequently discussed, examples of this being the large number of massively multiplayer online role playing games (frequently abbreviated to MMORPGs or MMOs), which attract player communities larger than the population of many small- to medium-sized countries. The most popular game currently is World of Warcraft, which (at time of writing) has more than 11 million registered players. However, online gaming is not just about MMORPGs. Beyond these contemporary examples, video gaming and the Internet have a long and mutual (even, at times, symbiotic) relationship, with video games providing a key early use for computer networks, which in turn have played a significant role in video game development and culture, by allowing games to be accessed, distributed, modified and discussed over network connections. But the history of the Internet, and its links to video gaming, is rather complex.

This chapter therefore provides a brief introduction to the study of online gaming. It begins with a short history of the Internet and online gaming, and then (following Burn and Carr 2006) considers three key areas of debate in game research – the ludic, representational and communal aspects of online gaming. The final section of the chapter provides a brief overview of the structure and content of this book.

A Brief History of Online Gaming

As any historian of worth would tell you, all history is contested. History is made, and then told by people, and people are inevitably subjective. Therefore, there is neither one history of the Internet nor that of video games, but rather a variety of fragments of information, some more or less contested than others, which are frequently drawn together to tell the ‘story’. Inevitably though, there will be differences, depending on who is telling the story. In the case of both the Internet and video games, their history is more complex because of the developmental paths both have followed.

Contrary to popular myths, most technologies are not, one day, simply ‘invented’ by one or more brilliant scientists. More commonly, technologies advance and develop in small increments, as it would appear was the case with the Internet. It is generally accepted that the origins of the Internet can be found in the loose conglomerate of computer networks that developed around the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States (US) Department of Defense in the late 1960s (Gere 2008). This was helped further by the development of a number of Internet protocols for the transmission of data in the 1970s, and most notably ‘Ethernet’ developed at Harvard University in 1974.

Contrary to its origins, advancement of the Internet was most notably driven by non-military needs and personal, and in particular newsgroups, bulletin-boards and multi-user dungeons or domains (MUDs), which helped establish new and more common applications of this technology. The increasing non-military use of the ARPANET led to a formal division into military and non-military networks, and then to its dissolution in 1989 (Gere 1989). Modems (which had been invented in the 1960s) allowed increasingly large networks to develop around educational and industrial, as well as military, usage. Access to modems, and their ease of use, was significantly assisted by the advent of the world wide web, first devised as an academic tool by Swiss physicist Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s, and then later the first web browser, ‘Mosaic’, developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applicants at the University of Illinois in 1993 (Gere 2008). By the mid-1990s, the Internet was rapidly spreading out of universities and industries into people’s homes.

It appears that, whenever and wherever humanly possible, people will always strive to find ways of playing with, and gaining pleasure from, new technologies. Even the most ‘serious’ of technologies, such as weapons, are utilized as the basis of sport, leisure and fun – such as target shooting – as it seems was the case for the early days of the Internet. Initially developed for military purposes, and finding immense value in the workplace, it was initially social networking, video gaming and, then later, music, video and pornography, which were crucial in cementing the significant place of the Internet within our culture.

Of particular interest here are MUDs. The origins of MUDs can be found in pen and paper (PnP) role-playing games (RPGs), such as and most notably, Dungeons and Dragons, which, though not the first, was (and continues to be) the most popular system within this genre of gaming. The rules of Dungeons and Dragons were first published in 1974, devised by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, but this was simply a development and greater formalization (and commercialization) of gaming trends and systems that had been growing in popularity through the 1960s, most notably on American university campuses. But PnP RPGs (particularly Dungeons and Dragons) have their origins in the much older practice of war gaming and, of course, the practice of acting out roles for fun is timeless (Fine 1983).

Dungeons and Dragons, and similar RPGs such as Traveller, Call of Cthulhu and Tunnels and Trolls were (and still are) normally played with other people in the same room, and hence are often referred to as face-to-face (FTF) or table-top RPGs. But RPGs (even before the publication of Dungeons and Dragons), and before them, war games, and other boardgames such as chess, were also played with other players at a distance, most commonly by post, frequently referred to as ‘play by mail’ (or PBMs), or in the case of chess, ‘correspondence chess’, which is centuries old. Hence, the rise of the Internet was concurrent with, if not pre-dated by, the increasing popularity of PnP RPGs; a leisure activity that already had a long history of gaming at a distance. Significantly, computer and Internet pioneers were drawn from the same demographic and located within the same locales (most notably universities) as PnP, play by mail and war gamers. Hence, it is of little surprise that one of the first non-military, (and back then) non-commercial, uses of evolving Internet technologies was RPGs.

What is generally seen as the first online RPG, MUD (which is where the genre takes its name from), was developed between 1978 and 1980 by, first, Roy Trubshaw, and then, Richard Bartle, at the University of Essex (Fox 2006). MUD was a text-based adventure game in which players were presented with written descriptions of an environment, which they responded to by typing in a number of pre-set options – such as ‘go west’ or ‘look’. The first text-based video game (which was single player and offline), called Adventure, had been developed a few years earlier in 1975 by Will Crowther, with others such as Zork, following quickly. Here, the Internet also played a key role in the development and spread of these games; games such as Adventure, Zork and those that pre-dated them, such as Spacewar!, were distributed over fledgling computer networks to others who played with, added to and expanded these games, as well as those taking them as inspirations for developing their own, new, video games.

Taylor (2006: 23) in her discussion of MUD describes this game as signalling ‘a new turn in which multi-user spaces were to become one of the most innovative developments within internet technologies and certainly a genre that excited many computer users’. MUD also paved the way for a closely linked phenomena, that of multi-user ‘persistent’ (or sometimes called ‘virtual’) worlds (Taylor 2006), such as Second Life.

Probably the first multi-user persistent world was TinyMUD developed by Carnegie Mellon student James Aspnes in 1989. TinyMUD was different from previous MUDs as it did away with much of the ‘game’ elements of the genre, instead focusing most notably on socializing (Keegan 1997; Taylor 2006). TinyMUD in turn paved the way for ‘world-building’ activities through MUD object oriented (MOO), developed by Stephen White and released in 1990. MOO, though still text-based, allowed users to create new ‘environments’, such as text described rooms and objects, which they and others could interact with. But a few years prior to this, in 1985, Lucasfilm Games (later to be renamed Lucas Arts in 1990) had developed the first online ‘graphical’ persistent world called Habitat.

The 1990s saw a rapid rise in the number and advancement of both graphical online persistent worlds and games. These included the graphic-based online chat room, OnLive Traveller, and increasingly video games, such as Diablo (released by Blizzard in 1996) were allowing gamers to play online with others. But it was Ultima Online in 1997 that safely secured the popularity of MMOs, adding massively multiplayer and world-building elements to an already very well established and successful series of computer-based fantasy RPGs, the Ultima series developed by Richard Garriott for Origin System games.

The previous decade or so has increasingly secured the importance and location of both the Internet and video gaming within our social and cultural lives, as well as strengthening the relationship between these technologies. Video gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry, and a recent poll by the Entertainment Software Association (2007) suggested that 67 percent of the heads of households in America ‘play computer or video games’. Global video games sales are now at levels comparable to box-office cinema receipts and more video games are now sold in the United States and United Kingdom than books (Bryce and Rutter 2006). Similarly, by 2009, almost three-quarters of the entire US population were ‘Internet users’ (Nielsen 2010). Certainly for those of us in the Western world, it is hard to imagine the domains of work or leisure without the Internet, which, for most of us, has become an integral part of our everyday lives.

The relationship between video games and the Internet is most vividly illustrated by MMORPGs, and this book is testament to that, including several chapters on MMORPGs by Douglas Brown, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Keith Massie, Christopher Paul, Jeffrey Philpott and Celia Pearce. But beyond the long list of current and previous massively multiplayer games, the Internet has provided a rich history of gaming opportunities, such as allowing the conversion of boardgames into online digital form (such as those discussed by Neil Randall in this book), the exploration of virtual worlds (like Second Life considered by Fern M. Delamere in this book), the production, distribution and play of ‘serious’ games (such as Wordslinger as outlined by Kate Taylor in this book) and game modifications (such as Aphra Kerr’s discussion of gamer productivity and innovation, and Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun’s consideration of the construction and use of private game servers).

It is also worth noting that online gaming is not restricted to PCs, and even the current generation of video game consoles (such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360), a form of hardware that was once considered paradigmatically different to the Internet-linked home computer, are making the Internet, online content and play a fundamental part of their gaming experience. Furthermore, in this book, Frans Mäyrä alerts us to the fact that online gaming no longer has to be location-specific, as online gaming has now become mobile, such as by being played on cellular (mobile) telephones.

It is apparent that online gaming forms an important part of (at least some) peoples’ everyday lives and identities, and is important and worthy of academic consideration. As Castronova (2005) has argued, online games (or ‘synthetic worlds’ as he calls them) are important because they may have economic consequences outside of the game. As he writes:

synthetic worlds … are now worthy of study … Once one recognizes that a silver piece in Sabert’s [his game character] world can have value just like a US Dollar, one must realize that a silver piece is not merely like money, it is money

(Castronova 2005: 47, emphasis in original)

But beyond their economic significance, online games also have a much wider and frequent social and cultural impact and significance, such as providing help for women suffering from domestic violence (Taylor, Chapter 16, this book), a sense of community and identity (Pearce, Chapter 10) or social networks and capital for people with disabilities (Delamere, Chapter 14), as well as so much more.

In considering the social and cultural significance of online games, Burn and Carr (2006) highlight what they see as three key motivations for playing online games, which they categorize as ‘ludic’, ‘representation’ and ‘communal’. These three categories, we wish to suggest, are not only useful ways of categorizing types of gamer motivation but also highlight key areas of debate that have been frequent, if not dominant, in online gaming discussions and literatures.

Key Debates on Online Gaming

Turning first to ‘ludic’ game motives and debates, the term ludic refers directly to aspects and definitions of game play. The starting point (or at least the fundamental assumption) of many ludic (or ludology) debates is the argument for considering video games as first and foremost ‘games’, and the use of which as ‘play’.

There is now a very well established and extensive literature on what constitutes a ‘game’, be it computer-based or otherwise. Mostly, this work draws upon earlier literature, and most notably the writings of John Huizinga (1949), Roger Caillois (1962) and Brian Sutton-Smith (both alone and in his work with E.M. Avedon, i.e. Avedon and Sutton-Smith 1971), which attempts to formally set out the characteristics and boundaries of games and/or play. In relation to video games, these theories are brought together by Jesper Juul (2005) in his formalization of, what he calls, a ‘classic game model’, in which he defines a classic game as

a rule-based...