Gaming networks offer very similar structures to social networking sites. Two obvious examples being Steam and Xbox Live! Through these networks, gamers are able to pick and choose their friends from the multitudes of others they play with through the course of their gaming experiences.
Boyd's notion of community, pertaining to online communities, asserts that “people define their community egocentrically,” suggesting that people create their online communities to serve their own needs, that they choose their friends in a self-serving fashion. This is in line with online gaming communities as well, gamers will pick and choose their friends within a game and if they persist playing that particular game they will more than likely being playing exclusively with friends they have previously played with.
A perfect example, at least for myself would be for the game Left 4 Dead (2008) in which the gamers are very reliant on the others on their team to progress through the levels, be it in co-op or versus mode. Gamers beginning to play that game will likely know very few players who play the game but as they play public matches they will find players they enjoy playing with. It is those players they find to be helpful in co-operative matches and deadly in versus matches that they will be more likely to add to their friends list and actively seek to join matches with in future games.
In this way gamers are egocentric, they enjoy the competition of playing with that person, or feel they function better as a team and therefore seek to repeat that experience. Does this change of 'community' effect gamers or the gaming community in any way? Yes, a lot, online gaming relies on online social networks to exist, if people only played with the people in their local area, or physical community then there wouldn't be any need for online gaming at all.
Social networks become gaming communities without realising it as well, look at the gaming that constantly takes place on Facebook, look at the Google Wave beta at the moment, its filling up with people running basic role playing events and games. These Wave RPGs are done in the old fashioned dice roll system, sometimes with a dice rolling bot and other times with actual physical dice rolls performed at home and shared through an honor system (Ars Technica).
So Boyd's new community definition, the egocentric selfish self-serving community is really something that the gaming industry relies on. People form their gaming communities so they can play with people they prefer to play with, when they do so they're happier playing the game and enjoy the experience more. When they're enjoying the experience more they're more likely to continue playing or buy the next game from the same company to get more of that positive experience.
“You can choose your friends but you can't choose your family,” the old saying seems fairly relevant when you convert it so something such as “You can't choose your community but you can choose your online community.” Boyd's community means everything to online gaming and the old function of the word means next to nothing.
Boyd, D. Friends, friendsters, and the top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. Retrieved 25/11/2009 from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1418/1336
Stokes, J. Google Wave: We came, we saw, we played D&D. Retrieved 25/11/2009 from http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/10/google-wave-we-came-we-saw-we-played-dd.ars
(Yes I realise I reference Ars Technica a lot).
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