Gaming and the gaming community have changed and in hand
significantly over the last 10 years, and continue to change every day, the
gaming industry is one of the fastest changing industries in the world and this
is also true of the community that it has spawned, thousands of people every
single day check their favourite gaming website, logon to their favourite
gaming forum and chat to friends they don’t know in person but consider good
friends, but where did this all start and why is the gaming community in the
modern world so extensive and ever changing, to analyse the building blocks
that have built up the gaming community, first you have to study the foundation
that it was built on.
If you ask any gamer over 30 what was their experiences
being a gamer when they were younger there is a high chance that the word
taboo, or stigma will come up, this is because being a gamer or talking about a
piece of gaming news in the school play grounds or at the park was considered
unacceptable, gaming was a very niche subject therefor there wasn’t a large
community. The gaming community 30 years ago would have been considered an
underground phenomenon, gaming was not as elevated in popular culture as it is
now, therefore there was a certain stigma attached to it. Almost to the extent
that if you wanted to go home and play a videogame instead of going out to play
football or go shopping you were in some way a lesser person, less masculine or
less feminine, the sad moral upshot to this is that as the stigma grew and it
became less “cool” to talk about games, the amount and severity of the bullying
did too, anyone who put themselves in the proverbial gaming community was a
target.
Another important area to explore is the actual term gaming
community; this itself is a complex idea that has transformed over the last few
decades, if you jump to present day a gaming community is a group of regular
people who get together to discuss and partake in what may be either their
hobby or career, inside the community there is a strong level of diversity, a
roster of people from all around the world that are not judged by religion,
sexual orientation, race, gender or any other act of discrimination.
Sadly this togetherness has only been achieved recently in
the last couple of years, again going back to the 30 year old gamer, he would
tell you that when he was younger gaming communities featured mainly males,
this is at least partially the fault of the gaming media of the time,
advertisements for games would be aimed at males and would feature some content
now deemed sexist, the women would be largely over sexualised, and would be
shown as weak or victims which lead them to be by default property of the
“powerful, brave” men. Many famous videogames would make the user rescue the
stranded female because she is weak and
defenceless, a prominent example of this is the Mario series which is
one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, this game featured a female
constantly getting rescued. The underlining tone of sexism in some of the early
games caused some females to in sense boycott video games, and therefor would
not be involved in the gaming communities of the time.
To begin to explore how the gaming community got to where it
is today at a basic level you simply need to look at the word community, what
actually is a community? A community is a social group of people who all are
all joined together by one common interest. A common community that most people
find themselves in is their neighbourhood community, in this example you are
all linked by location, and the fact you’re so close to them means it’s easy
for the community to build, but why shouldn’t this apply to a gaming community.
You might be thinking that it is a total different subject area and the two
can’t be the same but in theory it isn’t, the only difference is you’re not
seeing the people in person but you’re still having relations with them, and in
a lot of cases you are becoming good friends. In the gaming community that I
involve myself in I have a lot of people I would call very good friends who I
may have never met or only met a couple of times, and there is nothing wrong
with this, don’t fall into the stereotype of thinking everyone online who you
haven’t seen in person is crazy and out to get you, I have met many people in
person that I first met online and we instantly got on like we had been friends
for years and this is because we had.
Bullying although not as prominent in the gaming community
as it used to be still exists in small pockets, I must explain that when I say
bully I do not mean the stereotypical school sort of bully I mean real
bullying, serious bullying that happens long after you leave school and can
happen through life, be it bosses, friends or even family members. A bully may
say that because you’ve got a lot of online friends that you don’t have friends
in real life, this is completely not true, having friends in an online
community is not opposing having friends in real life it is the same thing
because they are real friends.
In this modern world the gaming community is a
lot more prominent in the media and is now a friendly place where any social
and cultural group is welcome, and will continue to grow for many years to come.
