INTRODUCTION

ARGUMENT

The gaming industry often advertise their products not only as computer entertainment, but as an opportunity for people to open their wallets, install and join a brand new and unique community. Not bad if you are looking for something more than a few hours of joy and frustration, hectic mouse clicking and keyboard punching.

Langdon Winner argues that “to invent a new technology requires society to invent the kinds of people who will use it, with new practices, relationships and identities supplanting the old … We can pretend to follow ‘where the technology is taking us’, to social outcomes ‘determined by market forces’, but the fact is that deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every day.”

There is no doubt todays (and yesterdays) games invite their users to interact with other gamers, even if the game itself is not internet-based, but is there enough to it to justify the classification of community? This case study investigates the game Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (MoH:AA) and is looking to determine whether or not it constitutes a community. In order to come to an accurate conclusion, we will look at and compare MoH:AA to a few different definitions of community, starting with Rheingolds. But first of all, let us check out the actual game, it’s history and how it works.

ABOUT MoH:AA

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is an action game in the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre. It was released by Electronic Arts (EA) in November 2001, and was later given several awards. Among them, awards for “action game of the year”, “best level” (for a sequence where the player takes part in the charge on Omaha Beach on D-Day) and for “best sound”. The player can choose whether he or she wants to play the single player campaign, or join one of the many online game servers available in multiplayer mode. Naturally, this case study focuses on the multiplayer side of MoH:AA.

There are four different styles of multiplayer gameplay available in multiplayer mode;

Free For All: Every player fights for himself against every other player in the server

Team Death Match: Two opposing teams fight each other

Round Based Team Death Match: Two teams fight each other until one of the teams are wiped out.

Objective Match: Two teams fight each other while trying to accomplish one or more objectives such as defending a position, destroying a target etc.

Once a player has connected to a server, s/he must choose either the allied (american, british or australian) or the Axis (german) side, and pick a primary weapon (rifle, sniper rifle, sub-machine gun, light machine gun, rocket launcher or shotgun) before s/he can join in on the virtual killing spree.

MoH:AA – A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY?

HOWARD RHEINGOLD

“Virtual communities are social aggregations that emerge from the Net when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”, Rheingold states.

So does MoH:AA fit in under these criterias? In the Telstra GameArena’s MoH:AA channel, which hosts game servers for the majority of Australian MoH:AA players, some “old-schoolers” (MoH:AA-players who has been around since the game was first released more than three years ago) still play regularily. “Most of them are long-time members or leaders of clans (player-run organisations), and are looked upon with respect” says “Jaladar”, MoH:AA Game Operator for Telstra Game Arena (GA) and clan leader of “Bashing Services”. According to ‘Ghetto Smurf’ “the fact that the MoHAA community is a fairly tight knit group only adds to the specialness of the game … you pretty much know everyone". Koivisto underlines this with the notion that “player to player interaction has a huge effect on player’s gaming experience. The game community may be the most important reason for the player to stay playing the game”.

Although one might wonder what Rheingold believe is “enough people”, “long enough” or “sufficient human feeling”, 100 per cent (10 out of 10) of the MoH:AA players I confronted with Rheingold’s definition of Virtual Communities believed they were indeed part of a community. We can only assume that gamers who has been clicking, typing, chatting, discussing and talking to each other for months, as much as a year – or even more, has been doing so long enough. Quentin Jones, however, notes that “the debate over the validity of Rheingold’s position has raised doubts about the existence of virtual communitites and the appropriate use of the term”.

FRANK WEINREICH

Weinreich defines community as “a collective of kinship networks which share a common geographic territory, a common history, and a shared value system, usually rooted in a common religion”.

Interestingly enough, when confronting another ten MoH:AA players – this time with Weinreich’s definition of community – they all came to the conclusion MoH:AA did not constitute a community. However, one of these added that although he did not believe MoH:AA filled the requirements for a community as per Weinreich’s definition, is was the word that best described the MoH:AA network.

Although it is obvious Weinreich does not believe there is such a thing as a Virtual Community, his definition on community might need some tweaking to better express his opinion. For instance we might ask ourselves what space is in today’s technology. Who is to say a virtually created space can not be a geographic place? We copyright material online, but how can we own something if it is nowhere? When we look at it this way MoH:AA might very well fit under Weinreich’s definition of community as well.

Let us say the arena on which MoH:AA players fight for their character’s life is the gamers common geographic territory. If gamers live in the same country they might share a common ‘real-life’ history, but even if they do not they might very well remember whatever milestones has been laid down in the relatively short history of MoH:AA. They play, or are urged to play, by the rules and policies created by server administrators, and they communicate actively with each other.

COMMUNICATION AND BONDING

Tharon W. Howard states that a community “must show evidence of discursive practices, conventions or codes that enable subscribers to inhabit certain endemic subject positions and exclude others”.

The MoH:AA Network has indeed formed it’s own practices, conventions and codes. The fact a person need to own a copy of, and play the game naturally excludes others. Organised conventions take place in the form of ladder tournaments between clans as well as occational ‘real-life’ meetings such as Local Area Network (LAN) gatherings. Several words and terms have been created which are unique for MoH:AA, examples of these are n00b-tube (rocket launcher), shotty-whore (player who solely uses the much disliked shotgun as his/her primary weapon), and land-sharking (making use of a software glitch that makes players appear as floating partly over, partly under the surface). More generalised gamer-words are also widely used, such as n00b (newbie), camper (player who stays in hiding rather than engaging the enemy), and nade-spammer (player who uses grenades extensively and randomly).

There are several ways of communication directly and indirectly connected to MoH:AA. The official website features a message board for help and support, though it seems independent boards and forums are more widely used. There are currently 27.738 posts on Telstra Game Arena’s Medal of Honor forums, and thousands more on private clan forums connected to the GA MoH:AA network. Gamers may communicate through the in-game chat system, third-party voice-communication software, and they often exchange E-mail addresses, MSN Messenger or ICQ details and form closer friendships outside the virtual gaming world.

CONCLUSION

This case study has set the facts of the MoH:AA network up against definitions on communities and virtual communities, as well as requirements for such to exist. Although scholars to a large extent disagree on what is and what is not a community and if such a thing can be formed in cyberspace, MoH:AA seems to meet most of the requirements listed here, even those of Frank Weinreich – that is, if we add a hint of good-will, intentional misinterpretation, and some good imagination.

It is beyond doubt that the MoH:AA gamers themselves feel they belong to something more than just a random gathering of gamers, although they do not appear to be quite sure what exactly that something is. What a large part of them do know, however, is that they take their gaming seriously and are keen on showing their online brothers in arms just that. They form their own teams, name them, recruit, replace and remove members, mark themselves with a clan tag in front of or at the end of their player-name. They build extensive web-sites and forums, print t-shirts with their clan name or tag on it, host their own servers for clan training and even record clan theme songs. They play MoH:AA drinking games and discuss politics, pixels and everything in between. In short, they do almost everything you and I do when we’re with our friends. As Fernback & Thompson puts it, “you can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries”.

REFERENCES

December, J. (1997) The last link: Communities exist in cyberspace
http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/feb/last.html

Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1995) Virtual communities: Abort, retry, failure?
http://www.well.com/user/hlr/texts/VCcivil.html

Howard, T. (1997) A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities

Jones, Q. (1997) Virtual-communities, virtual settlements & cyber-archaelogy: A theoretical outline
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue3/jones.html

Koivisto, E. Supporting communities in massively multiplayer online role-playing games by game design
http://www.cs.tut.fi/%7elina/docs/communities_mmorpg_emik.pdf

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http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/

Telstra Game Arena Messageboards, Medal of Honor Series
http://www.gamearena.com.au/messageboards/mohseries/index.php
http://www.gamearena.com.au/messageboards/mohseries/thread.php/3018648

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http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/feb/wein.html

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community

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