Online Games: Living in Virtual Reality

Chung, Calvin Jericsson Jaranilla         2015-09502          Eng10 THV2                   September 20, 2015

Living in Virtual Reality

        World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, World of Tanks, Minecraft, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto V, and last but not least, League of Legends! These are but a few popular examples of online games, and the majority of today’s generation knows or have heard of at least one of the aforementioned games above. More than 1.2 billion people are playing games worldwide, according to a state of the industry report by Spil Games. Of those, about 700 million play online games. That amounts to 44 percent of the world's online population according to comScore data, cited by Spil. As you can see, online games have become a large factor of people’s lives, affecting not only the gamers themselves but also people they interact with on a daily basis, both gamers and non-gamers alike. For example, according to Time, researchers found that 75% of gamers’ spouses wished they would put more effort into their marriage, and when one person spent a lot more time gaming than the other, it usually led to dissatisfaction and arguing. Like any other activity that gets in the way of couples’ intimacy and family time, gaming had the same effect.

This essay aims to show how words or the language used by people may shape their actions or the way they act and think; although we will be primarily focusing on a certain group of people, namely the online gaming community. So what is the online gaming community? Well Stolterman et al. (1997) define an online community as “a group of people trying to achieve something as a group of people that are using new information technology as a mean”. From this definition then, we can say that the online gaming community is a group of people joining forces for a period of time to play and interact with each other, not in real life but using a virtual network such as the Internet. Apart from the technical definition, we can also look at the key components that make up the said community; we shall start by defining what an online game is; Insafe defines it accordingly: “An online game is a game played over a computer network, whether using a PC over the internet, via an internet-connected games console or on a handheld device such as a mobile phone or smartphone.” From this definition then, we go on to defining the people who make up the said community, the gamers. Put simply, a gamer is anyone who plays a game; although it used to refer to those people who spend the majority of their day in front of a television or computer screen, the landscape of video games is changing, as written by Lisa Winter in IFLSCIENCE, “gamers don’t just have to be the ones planning on taking a week off of work when Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare comes out this November. They can also be the ones with Level 8 Town Halls in Clash of Clans or those who have gotten to level 500 in Candy Crush. There’s no one type of gamer out there.” We will limit this research to one game, the most famous MOBA(Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game out there today, League of Legends!