Community in Pixels

What makes a community is not the physical space, but the human connection.

BY: POLEN LIGHT 

Art by Daniel Gomes // THE UNDERGROUND

December of 2012 was when I first celebrated the Yule Festival. I was among people I didn’t know yet, who were making snowmen, throwing snowballs, having drinks, or wrapping gifts. This was probably the most wholesome and exciting celebration for 12-year-old me, and I experienced it completely through pixels of a virtual game world. 

Due to their nature, video games can cultivate a large following of people across the world. They’re easily distributed through both physical and digital mediums and mostly presented through services such as Steam, Playstation Network, and such, where it’s easy to socially interact with both the neighbour next door and the person on the other side of the world. 

The fans of the games often discuss ideas, create artwork, and share their experiences that are related to the game. It is not surprising to find dedicated subreddits for most major games, hundreds of pages of forum entries, YouTube videos, and more. And then there are Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), where usually players create avatars and act based on the lore of the world and premise of the game. MMORPGs literally allow massive numbers of players to play at the same time. Arguably the world’s most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, had a peak of 12 million active players.

Veiled behind keyboard mashing, shouting weird jargon over the microphone, and spending many hours with a crooked back, many great communities have emerged and shown examples of real human interaction in virtual game worlds, especially in MMORPGs. It is quite common to hear from family or friends that one should get out of their room and spend some time outside in the real world. But while the outside may be more real than the virtual world, communities created within the virtual worlds are no less real than the communities outside. 

2015 Yule Festival celebrated by a group of friends in Lord of The Rings Online // Photo by Britta Siemen

My dad introduced me to the world of video games when he had to keep seven-year-old me occupied as he worked. I initially played browser games until I got my first laptop when I was about nine. For a long time, they were a cool escape from an uneasy life. Everything changed when I first stumbled my way into a (very terrible) MMORPG called Rappelz. 

I played Rappelz for a good few weeks from a hotel room while my parents were working and I was all alone in a foreign city. At first I was expecting the game to be a single-player game, but it being an MMORPG, I was dazzled to find there were actually “real” people running around, trading, and talking. Although I sucked at the game due to being a child, the game offered social interactions where I could just approach random people and say hi or ask for help in the game without fear or anxiety. As a kid who had social interaction issues, this was a blessing I could never dream of at that age.

Afterwards I dropped Rappelz pretty quickly and adjusted back to my daily life with less video games and more real interactions. When I finished primary school at age ten, I moved to another city with no friends and no contacts. As a socially anxious person and totally foreign to the culture and network of my new “rich kid” school, I was not going to have any social interaction with people of my age outside school hours for the next three years. 

In the next summer or so, as I had tons of free time from holidays and no friends, I was searching for games to occupy me when I stumbled upon a MMORPG called Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO). It was a game where you created a lore-friendly avatar of yourself and played within the world of Middle-Earth with many other players, going to landmark sites and interacting with key characters from Tolkien’s world.

For my second case of getting into another MMORPG I had more time and awareness this time. I could interact with others on a better level and had more understanding of the game which made me stick to it longer. However, just like the first time getting into the world of Rapplez, LotRO also dazzled me.

This time I was not surrounded by Turkish people who were dominantly from one of the two major cities, but people from all across Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa who primarily spoke English. I met people who were radio hosts, 9 to 5 white collar workers, children with scoliosis; everyone was from a different segment of society. It was almost like a constant mini United Nations gathering. 

In this virtual world, everybody was open to communicating to a degree but was never closed off completely. It being a virtual world with its own rules and power dynamics, anyone who played the game average or above average had something to communicate with other people about, whether it was gifting items, trading, or offering help. This allowed a very basic 12-year-old me in real life to talk with people I would have never been able to otherwise in this virtual world.

In one instance, I was meeting with our guild’s second-in-command to receive an item. She was a kind person who’d help beginners by crafting good quality items for them. Whatever she crafted, she’d name it “Albatross.” As I got closer to her, I asked her why. She then sent me a link to the guild’s website. Her husband was the guild leader who died of cancer eight months ago. At the webpage there was a pinned announcement that stated the news. The post had a picture of the guild leader with a puppy in his hands, taken a few weeks before he died. The announcement’s comments had tributes and kind words from players who I had played with only a few hours ago. Despite being miles away from each other, everyone in our little community had felt sadness.

It was not uncommon for players of MMORPG to suddenly vanish. Some die and you never even realize, some may have forgotten their passwords for old accounts and created a new one, and some simply get tired of the game and leave without saying anything. At first one thinks something happened and they couldn’t make it today, then it becomes a week and you hope they’re fine and life is just busy. Then they simply don’t come back online and with the sadness of losing a buddy, you remove them from your friends list.

Skips sitting next to graves meme template in the context of MMORPG, depicting friends leaving the game after a while // Source

But the community that virtual games can give to people are not all doom and gloom. There are dozens of stories where people meet in these virtual games and get married. There are couples like the one I mentioned earlier that can cultivate a community that they care about and have the community continue even after death. Elif Ayiter, who is a professor of digital arts, holds exhibits and runs a clothing design studio solely based within Second Life, a virtual game where real life is simulated, with fellow artists and her students.

These virtual game worlds give players tools like allowing them to build a home and creating and customizing avatars to express themselves more freely or act how they would like to. Just like the real world, these virtual worlds and communities have their significant figures, festivals and special events they celebrate, slang, and everything that makes a “real” community a community.

ALPHA.TRIBE fashion store, operated by Elif Ayiter’s avatars. // “making eccentric attire for creative virtual world residents” // Photo courtesy of Elif Ayiter

The main ways that virtual communities diverge from IRL ones, other than the physical distance, is how the communities are formed, how they are maintained, and how they carry out their rituals—or more simply, their DNA.

Virtual communities are also much more reliant on imagination and acting. The virtual worlds contain mechanics and features that are oriented towards gameplay and not necessarily interactions between players. For example, it is quite common for MMORPGs to feature many types of transportation and economic mechanics, but only a few ways to express yourself. If you want to go to a picnic by the lakeside with your friends after a hard day of monster-slaying, all your avatars can do is awkwardly sit next to a body of badly simulated water without expression. It is left up to players to act as if they’re actually having a joyful picnic. 

Another aspect of a virtual environment is the tools given to the player to express themselves in different ways. A player’s in-game avatar can be of a different race and gender, or possess a different name, abilities, and talents compared to IRL. Or in the case of LotRO, the player can be a literal monster from Tolkien’s world. 

Through these avatars one can express not-so-obvious personality traits with greater ease or be someone else entirely. Whether you just want to scream war chants as a brutal orc to let off steam or be a motherly figure for your group of people, virtual communities allow you to be whoever you want to be while generating genuine interactions.

The primary reason players seek a community online is that players are looking for buddies to share the game experience, thus all communities that are formed virtually have something that ties the group to thatworld. The strength of the tie to the game varies from group to group; one group might have formed solely to bring German players together, while another group could be heavily invested in the lore of the game, thus only accepting elves into the guild and acting as elves. 

After finding a like-minded community in these virtual settings, the members bond over actions and activities that can’t be recreated in real life. In the game worlds players can’t go camping, but they can instead go on an epic journey to slay monsters. While competitive sports do not exist in the game, players can satisfy their needs through competing in player versus player arena settings. Gathering in a house and having a round of drinks may not be possible, but players can host a poetry competition and still chill together.

Since the primary drive for being in the virtual setting is about games, the strength of the community is dependent on how invested their members are in the virtual setting. There is little a community can do to prevent members from leaving once they lose interest in the game.

Rubysue’s farewell adventure, where virtual friends of Rubysue gathered to go on fishing, ale drinking, and adventuring to remember their friend.

It is also very important to recognize unique challenges and issues the virtual communities harbour compared to real world communities. Spending excessive time playing games may create health issues or trigger unhealthy behaviours. The games are dominantly for-profit ventures, and many feature mechanics where the player can spend real money to gain an advantage in the virtual game. Children and people with gambling tendencies are specifically exploited by these mechanics. Identity and asset theft is also common. Mostly done via social engineering rather than hacking, people with malicious intent can easily impersonate someone and take away the victim’s assets in the virtual world.

Another critical issue that virtual communities face is that these multiplayer games—and the communities that exist within them—depend on the servers hosting them, companies that fund the game, and intellectual property (IP) owners. A malfunction in host servers, the company going bankrupt or pulling the plug on the game due to monetary concerns, or a lawsuit by IP holders could mean an abrupt end of these communities, making them very fragile unless members have exchanged contact information.

Although virtual communities have their own differences and problems, those communities were the ones that shaped me as a child. I had “adventures” and laughs with other players, talked to previously unreachable people which broadened my horizons, and it helped me cope with my loneliness. While I haven’t considered myself to be a part of an online community in a very long time, I can still remember players’ nicknames and conversations, as opposed to people from middle school, and that community feels no lesser than any real-world ones.

We may be quite far from a Ready Player One-esque world where the majority of the community spends their time in a virtual world. But the experiences, laughs, tears, memories, and communities shared in game worlds are just as genuine and organic as the ones in the real world.