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Sue Morris, "Social Organisation and Regulation in an Online Multiplayer Computer Gaming Community" Over the past five years, a massive online gaming community has built up around first-person shooter (FPS) computer games, such as Quake3Arena and Half-Life Counter-Strike, involving hundreds of thousands of players with some 80,000 FPS gamers actively playing online at any one time. While computer gaming, especially within the FPS genre, is commonly thought of as an unregulated, and even anti-social pastime, particularly within the ongoing moral panic surrounding such games, the online world of FPS gaming is actually highly regulated from within, with players having many distinct and widely agreed-upon rules and social conventions regarding both gameplay and online social behaviour. While the rules of single-player games are those designed and enforced within the game software, the evolution of multiplayer gaming environments and communities has led to a large body of rules and social conventions developed and enforced not by software developers, but by gamers themselves. This paper looks at the development and operation of social rules within the FPS gaming community, and what may be learnt from these in terms of the mechanisms of power and control in this type of online, virtual community, the underlying values held by FPS gamers and how gamers understand their position and responsibilities as members of this community, and the inter-relationship between gamers and game designers in ensuring the maintenance of functioning gaming environments. Examination of such self-regulating gaming communities can also suggest ways in which certain existing notions of social discipline and control may be re-evaluated in the presence of new and emerging virtual social spaces. Biography: Sue Morris is a Ph.D. candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, and is currently researching online multiplayer computer game culture. Her specific areas of interest include the construction and negotiation of subjectivity in gaming environments, gender and games, and the current fears surrounding issues of game violence and game addiction. In a dim, distant past life when she still actually had time to play games she was an avid player of first-person-shooter and strategy games and was founder of Australia's first all-female Quake II clan. |
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