Media Ethnography: Online Gamers

I chose to study my close friend Steve, who is an avid, hardcore gamer. He and I have known each other since we were small children, and as far back as I can remember, Steve has loved video games.  Here's what might be a recent photo of Steve:

Steve is an active member of a subculture of individuals who play video games online, within a highly populated network known as Xbox Live. He almost exclusively plays games in the category known as "first-person shooters", which are war games involving projectile weapons (rifles, pistols, machine guns, etc.), with a first-person perspective of the action. These games typically occur in a complex fantasy environment populated by a large number of other online gamers, who are presumably logging in from all over the country, and even the world.

As I spoke with Steve about the subculture of online gaming, it became evident that an entire complex discourse has been developed by these individuals. As Steve was describing his experiences and answering my questions, he frequently used a wide variety of terms and phrases which I was unfamiliar with, and I sometimes needed him to clarify. But within this subculture, it is just assumed that these things are understood. There are standards, protocols, and etiquette for playing these games online that must be adhered to, or else a player may be shunned, ridiculed, or generally disliked. Listen here to an excerpt from the interview related to this idea:


As Steve continued to describe the commonly accepted standards of behavior in these games, I couldn't help wonder what happened to individuals who totally deviated from the norm. He explained that there is an established system of "Player Reviews" for keeping people in line, which seemed similar to the feedback systems used by online marketplaces like eBay or Amazon.com. Apparently, if a player is really lousy and is causing the teams he joins to lose, or if he isn't following the understood standards of teamwork, or even if he simply doesn't own a microphone for communicating with the others in a match, it's likely that people will write poor reviews on that player's Xbox Live profile page, and consequently other players will be likely to avoid that player in the future, or to even block him or her from their matches. (It's simply expected that a person will be using a mic...)

In rarer circumstances, players will blatantly cheat, and then others can lodge official complaints against that person, which may lead to real-world penalties. Listen to Steve and I discuss that here:


As would be expected when a group of people spend a lot of time at an activity together, bonds of friendship and camaraderie form. Steve explained that over the years he's spent gaming online (almost ten years now, since the first Xbox was released), he's developed some significant friendships with people he met while playing. Like many online gamers, he's got a core group of friends and associates that he plays with (or against) very often, and many of these are individuals that he's never actually met in person. But that's irrelevant in this culture; the bonds and kinship formed within the gaming universe are every bit as significant to them... Some close-knit groups of friends even form "clans", and organize practice sessions together. You can listen to Steve describe this phenomenon here:


Steve went on to describe that some gamers are so talented, and spend so much time gaming, that they have actually been able to turn it into an entrepreneurial endeavor, earning real-world income (not by gambling or betting...). Apparently, there's a loophole in the numerical Experience Rating system that allows a very highly rated person to give someone with little or no experience a significant boost, raising that person's status at a very fast rate, with very little effort on the part of the inexperienced player. Thus, the high-status players charge "noobs" (slang for "rookies") actual money to raise their status. Steve and I discuss this form of "talent sub-contracting" here:


If I were ever to revisit this topic in the future, I think I'd like to compare and contrast the type of gamer that Steve is with the type a hardcore gamer characterized by my other close friend Scott. Scott has, like Steve, been a life-long gamer, and spends many hours per week with video games. The major difference is that Scott doesn't play games online. Ninety-nine percept of the gaming that Scott engages in is single-player, and offline, yet he's still every bit as dedicated and skilled as Steve. It's just that the social aspect off online multiplayer gaming isn't a huge draw for him like it is for Steve. I think a comparative analysis of these two types of gamers would be intriguing... Another time...