Online gaming communities are susceptible to a lot of backlash in modern media due to the number of dangers that some users may face when trying to navigate an online space, such as hackers, trolls, and other dangerous people you may find, as well as dangerous content. Media has been loaded with stories full of negative experiences on social media platforms and online gaming forums. However, Online gaming communities are the backbone behind the gaming industry’s success, for without players there wouldn’t be a market for video games, television, or any other form of media. In this case study I aim to observe the positive aspects of online gaming communities and how important they are for not only video game players but everyone in society now.
An online community, according to Melanie Bond from Higher Logic, is a group of people with a shared interest or purpose who use the internet to communicate with each other. Online communities have their own set of guidelines and needs, like online community engagement, moderation, and management. Realistically, everyone with a form of social media is part of an online community: whether it be a group chat with friends or family, a local city group on Facebook, or even those focusing on a particular interest or topic like a Reddit sub-forum or other kind of online chat forum. There are many different kinds of online communities, but in this study, I want to focus on specifically online gaming communities.
Online gaming communities come in many different shapes and sizes, often focusing on a particular game, franchise, or kind of content. Communities can include chat rooms, follower bases, and even just a collection of people who talk about a particular topic online, no matter what the size is. Online gaming communities have a number of positive benefits, one being that it’s an excellent way of making friends. In modern society, people will talk about pop culture, current events, and other subjects with others and make connections through that, but in online communities, you’re able to skip straight to talking about your interests with others who are interested in the same things that you are. In a 2000 report run by researcher Sonja Utz, she found that 74% of players she spoke to had formed lasting, meaningful relationships through gaming communities. Cara Ellison, a writer for “The Guardian”, wrote about her relationship with a group of friends in the online game “Defense of the Ancients”, saying the following: “Some people think that gaming is a solitary hobby. But for me, DotA was a way to connect with my real-life friends through an experience that didn’t include a darkened room serving overpriced alcohol we couldn’t afford. We got to know each other by style of play and syntax of insults. We got to know each other better by issuing orders or coming to someone’s aid. We talked to each other over the game like it mattered that we heard each other. And later, when we could afford to leave our rooms, we’d sit in a pub together and laugh endlessly at mishaps and in-jokes and personality quirks, as if our characters were part of ourselves.”
Online communities have proven to be a major part of many people’s lives, myself included. But they’ve actually been able to save people’s lives as well. In early 2020, a young boy from the UK known as Aidan Jackson suffered from a seizure while his parents were downstairs and completely unaware of what was occurring. Aidan was on a call with his online friend, Dia Lathora, who lives in Texas. In an interview with BBC news, she said that she had gone for a moment and as soon as she came back she immediately heard Aidan having a seizure:
“I just put my headset back on and I heard what I could only describe as a seizure, so obviously I started to get worried and immediately started asking what was going on and if he was OK. “When he didn’t respond I instantly started to look up the emergency number for the EU. When that didn’t work I just had to hope the non-emergency would work, it had an option for talking to a real person…and I can’t tell you how quickly I clicked that button.”
If it were not for Dia, Aidan would have been in a much worse state than he already was, or even potentially have died. Ms. Jackson, Aidan’s parents, was extremely thankful to Dia for possibly saving Aidan’s life. “We are extremely thankful for what Dia did and shocked that we could be downstairs and not know anything was happening,” BBC reports. This goes to show the luck that Aidan had, and that being a part of an online community, as Did and Aidan were talking to each other before the fit happened, can have a significant positive effect on someone’s life.
As seen in the two anecdotes above, online communities clearly have a profound effect on people’s lives and are very important to them. I would now like to touch on an online community I am personally a part of, Nintendo’s Splatoon community, a game that quite literally thrives off of its community and players.
Splatoon is a third-person shooter game owned and developed by Nintendo and is one of the company’s most successful franchises in the modern era. The game is set in post-apocalyptic Earth where you play as the primary inhabitants: Inklings and Octolings, based off of squids and octopi. These Inklings and Octolings often engage in ink-based battles for fun, either to cover the most amount of turf in a match or for another objective in its Ranked and X battle modes. Splatoon has sold over 28 million copies within its franchise and has an extremely active online community across multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Discord, Reddit, and Youtube, filled with professional and competitive players, content creators, artists and even just general fans of the series.
Ever since the game’s release, it has actively encouraged people online to post their thoughts and feelings thanks to the plaza systems. In each game’s city location, you can find other players and their own Inklings and Octolings standing around and interacting with the environment. In this plaza, you are free to post drawings and texts for everyone to see, giving players the ability to create funny posts, amazing pieces of art and even some viral quotes that have been spawned within the community thanks to this system. If you like or enjoy a post someone may put up, you are able to leave a “Fresh!” Interaction on their character profile, making them even more popular and more likely to pop up in other people’s plazas, thus creating a more connected and intertwined online network.
Another key feature, and by far the most popular and well-renowned feature, of Splatoon is an in-game event known as a “Splatfest.” In a Splatfest, players are given a question and pick a team for their answer, each team having a corresponding in-game idol that represents them. Splatfest are a large-scale, vibrant carnival where the setting turns to night and the music idols of each game perform and parade the city plazas, creating an amazing atmosphere where players can enjoy fighting for their opinion on the question posed to them. Because of how polarising the questions are, for example, “Which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle is your favourite?” or “What came first – the chicken or the egg?”, Splatfest are often subject to a lot of publicity online, almost always trending on platforms like Twitter when one of the events comes around every month, and even getting major brands on board such as McDonald’s, Uniqlo, Nike, Pocky and Nickelodeon as well as other Nintendo intellectual properties such as Pokemon and Super Mario Brothers.
The crucial part of Splatoon though is it’s playerbase. The single player modes are rather basic and are mainly used as tutorials bar the campaign in Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion and Splatoon 3’s Return of the Mammalians. Otherwise, Splatoon’s online features and Splatfest as a whole are entirely dependent on the online community, making a co-dependent relationship with the game where if players play the game a lot, the events and fights will be more successful, and thus the game will be more successful. If not, the game does not have consumers to sell and thus would fail as a series entirely. Because of how wonderful the online community is, I myself have been able to make a number of friends and keep in touch with them daily, as well as play alongside them in Splatoon matches and Splatfest.
Online gaming communities are largely what helps games remain active and popular, and sometimes can even be the cornerstone of the games themselves. Competitive fighting games, for example, rely heavily on their player base for the livelihood of their games. For competitive Pokemon, for example, there are two kinds of competitive scenes: VGC and Singles. VGC is run mainly by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company, but Singles is run majorly by the community, on a website known as Smogon. Smogon is an online community dedicated to playing the main series of installments of the Pokemon franchise competitively in a singles 6v6 format. Smogon operates on a series of clauses and rules that are unique to it – however, are unofficial – in an attempt to make the game series as competitive and in control of the players as possible due to the high variance Pokemon mechanics have.
The community is divided heavily across different usage tiers, with each tier having a different leader and small community. However, aside from the competitive side, the community is extremely multifaceted despite what appears to be a very niche focus. Smogon is home to many different social and contribution circles dedicated to writing analyses for certain tiers, socializing about other parts of the game, and even creative spaces to enable artists. Because Smogon has so many working parts, it’s easy for people of any background or interest in the series to engage with Smogon outside of direct tiering focus. Smogon as a whole is an incredibly welcoming community and is run entirely for players, by players, and play a key part in Pokemon’s competitive community.
Online gaming communities may often get a bad wrap from those in the media due to the stereotype that often surrounds them as being dangerous and filled with horrible people, but online communities are actually very healthy, fun and safe places if you know what you are doing and practice basic cyber safety. If it were not for online communities run through social media, a lot of the entertainment industry would completely collapse, video games in particular. Online communities are integral to not just those in gaming communities, but nearly everyone around the world now, whether it is for a group chat amongst friends, a real-life community using the internet as another medium, corporations aiming to interact and reach their audience, or even those with a particular interest looking to find others to talk to.
Stuart, K. (2017, December 12). Gamer communities: the positive side. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/jul/31/gamer-communities-positive-side-twitter
Teen having seizure saved by online gamer in Texas. (2020, January 10). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-51063009
Wikipedia Contributors. (2019, September 19). Splatoon. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splatoon
Bond, M. (2019, March 17). What is an Online Community? The Basics & Benefits. Higher Logic. https://www.higherlogic.com/blog/what-is-an-online-community/
Hi L, The thing is the paper is mainly concentrated on the African continent particularly.If you make an analysis of…