Beyond Boundaries

The last article about the importance of community in online gaming that I read for my Game Design class this semester was "Online Game communities are social in nature" by Cindy Ahuna. This article is a little older and talks a lot about the past of online gaming and how multiplayer games started. Reading through the article, this paragraph stood out to me:

"In a global point of view, the Internet is the living organism that hosts many online systems. Boundaries of geography, economy, culture, degrees of education and family traditions have disappeared. Gamers are co-authors that take part in the experience. Communities are playing fields for social interaction. When gamers send messages to other gamers, they are free to exchange email addresses and meet beyond the game community. Communities have become an extension, a new medium of human touch."

I thought that it was interesting that Ahuna described online communities in this way. If I think about it, I'd say I agree, it is an extension of human contact. It breaks boundaries that previously held people back and lets people talk and learn with and from whomever they so choose. Community is probably one of the most important parts of online games because it exposes you to other people and lets you learn.

Girls with Games

I read an article called "Gender and Sexism in Online Gaming Communities" by Matt Rafalow. This article talked about how female gamers are treated within the community and how cultural norms and expectations shape women gamers. I'll only be looking at one part of the article (that really interested me) for this blog post.

Rafalow begins by talking about how there is an increase in female gamers, but often cultural ideas about women and their role/what they do  affect how they game. Some research he looked at showed that there were three directions that women went when it came to games. The first was all out gamer who got involved in the creation of games as well as enjoying playing games. The second was a casual gamer who played games to relax and maybe was involved in forums and such, but they didn't get involved much more than that. The third way they could go is not seeing any point in games at all and moving toward more traditional 'girl roles'.

Unfortunately, very few women are in the first category. Having both male and female in a community shows that it is a healthy and growing community that can come up with brilliant ideas that otherwise would not be possible. The (gradual) balance of genders in the community is probably going to help games and the gaming community become better and better in years to come.

Player Rights

I read the essay "Declaring the Rights of Players" by Raph Koster. This essay was published in 2000 and I found it in a book of essays that I borrowed from my professor called "The Game Design Reader: A Rule of Play Anthology". (Sorry I borrowed it for so long!)

This essay started by talking about the idea of giving rights to online avatars. The author wrote up a 'Declaration of the Rights of Avatars' that was based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by the National Assembly of France on August 26 of 1789 with Articles based on the US Bill of Rights. (To say the least, this document was very loftily written and I had a bit of a hard time getting through it.) The author then sent this document to "a collection of the smartest virtual world admins and designers" that he knew. Their responses to the document were rather critical and defensive, like they didn't want to give players written rights like that for fear that their power as admins and such might be taken from them.

So the author revised the document into more modern English (thank goodness), using common words rather than dictionary terms used in laws and such. The document said the same things, just in simpler and more friendly terms that made it seem like guidelines rather than an imposing law. He had some of the same people review the new document and it turned out that they were much more supportive of this revised version.

The author concluded that rather than have the rights of avatars, we should have general guidelines (like the ones he wrote) that are there to hold a standard for admins and have something players can hold admins to in order to ensure fair play.

I thought this essay was interesting. It's a bit old, but I think it still applies to gameplay today. At first I wasn't sure where the author was taking it, or how it would tie into my research idea of community in gaming; but after finishing the essay I realized that it was all common sense and common courtesy. The character, be it admin or not, has a human being behind it. The revised document states this right off the bat: "[Game] players are people. They don't stop being people when they log on." If both players and admins remember this and just treat each other as people, a lot of problems would be solved within gaming communities.

(Pro tip: The same goes for real life too.)