Tommy Truong
Kim Knight - Viral Media
Topic: Effects of Viral Media on the Image of Gaming Society
1. Introduction
Running parallel with the activities of our daily lives, there are a multitude of digital realms that concurrently exist with the real world. These are worlds were people create their avatars in a virtual world and carry on virtual lives (Shen and Williams, 125). They join groups and meet others inside the game to progress and level with time. People with the same mindsets and goals may establish even larger groups, commonly referred to as legions or guilds, to carry on activities on a wider scale. Communities are created inside the world established to help other players reach goals and enjoy their time in the game. Economic behavior closely resembles that of the real world, where supply and demand helps develop market prices. Instances and quest lines helps users work as teams and develop leadership and communication skills. Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) are much more complex then they seem and unless a person has actually had the opportunity to experience it, the opinions they form of these unique habitats are completely null.
However, there has been a negative connotation placed upon the idea of gaming worlds. Ideas that all participants in these games are immature, teenage boys with anger issues, old anti-social obese men that live in their mother’s basement, are isolated, or have an obsession with the game (Shaw, 411). These images are only worsened with the existence of viral media portraying the absolute extremes about the community. I will not make the claim that such people do not exist, but that these social stereotypes are a very small minority of the demographic. Ask me four years ago and I might have agreed wholeheartedly with these stereotypes, but after being introduced into a gaming community, my mindset has dramatically changed. Along personal experiences combined with some research, this paper aims to demolish the current stereotype of gamers and expose some more light on the gaming culture.
2. History
The history of MMORPGs can be traced back to 1974 with the release of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) into the market. D&D was the first game that allowed individual players to use their “imagination and creativity to contribute to the ongoing game” (Radoff, 2010). Branching off D&D were the wire-frames for the earliest MMOs, called Multi-User Dungeons (MUD).
The first popular computer game was called Adventure (ADVENT for short because naming nomenclature only allowed six characters), originally created in 1975 by Will Crowther and expanded by Don Woods at Stanford University in 1976 (Bartle). The game was created for Digital Equipment Corporation’s (DEC) Programmed Data Processor model 10 (PDP-10) computers that had been adopted by many university computer labs and was shared across The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a system that networked researcher in the country (Anderson). ADVENT contained many characteristics of the popular D&D game, however the computer program played the Game Master (GM) (Bartle).
Following ADVENT was a game called Zork created by a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977. It started out as the side project of Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels and Dave Lebling - who had all played and beat ADVENT and were looking for new challenges (Anderson). Zork was built in several stages over a series of years and implemented to same game theories as ADVENT with some extra features (Bartle).
The first actual Multi-User Dungeon game was simply called MUD and was produced in 1978 by Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in England. Richard Bartle, another Essex student who took the dungeon aspects of Zork and added the multiple-user aspect of it, usurped the project. (Bartle). The project was played upon the UK CompuNet network.
Crossing through the 1990s, the idea of the Internet became widely adopted and became “an indispensable part of contemporary work and social life (Shen and Williams, 124). As the Internet became popular, the opportunity for Massive Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) increased as well. There was a new market of consumers for games and developers were creating the new virtual worlds that were competing for audiences. Some of the environments that were released in at the end of the 1990s included Ultima Online, Lineage, and Everquest.
None, though, were as successful as Blizzard’s 2004 release of World of Warcraft, which bolsters just over 11 million subscriptions (Geel, 2011). Acquiring such a massive user base so rapidly, World of Warcraft opened up and new massive network of users spreading information and collaborating with one another.
3. Viral Media and Effects
With Youtube’s launch in November of 2005, the mass majority of the Internet user base now have the ability to share videos on a global scales. Some are shared with family and friends and stay in that isolated network. However, there are videos that manage to catch the attention of the mass public and go viral. These viral videos have had a lot of influence over how society views gamers and seem to always portray the negative extremes of the gaming culture. Those that have never played an MMORPG only have these videos to make their opinions from and this has provided a skewed societal view that only hides the real ethnography of the culture, referring to “who plays video games, how they play, and what they play” (Shaw, 404). Taking Shaw’s three categories of defining video game culture, we will take some of the most popular videos and see how they define video game culture and how the particular media has affected societies views on the gaming community.
Sitting at over 28 millions views, the “Leeroy Jenkins” video is one of the most popular videos associated with the MMORPG community. The video shows a group of players in World of Warcraft participating in one of the instances when a character names Leeroy charges ahead leading to his groups demise. In this particular case Leeroy’s objective was to wipe his team for the simple reason of agitating other players, providing another negative aspect to the gaming culture.
Bolstering over 56 million views, “The Greatest Freak Out Ever” has provided humor through recording the teenage rage of a World of Warcraft player. The original video shows the reaction of a teenager when his parents cancel his World of Warcraft subscription. It is quite an interesting video and the most commented aspect of the video involves a remote. Although humorous, this video does more harm then good because it further strengthens the idea that the gaming community consists of primarily teenage boys with anger and mental issues.
“Francis Gets His Warcraft Account Hacked” is not quite as popular, but it still holds over two million views. It is a video of an overly obese white male complaining about the events of his life. This video touches an emotional appeal with the audience, some can’t help but feel sorry for they guy and some can’t help but make fun of him. Either way, it is videos like Francis’ that give the gaming community such a negative light.
Felicia Day’s web-series, The Guild, is a story about a group of local gamers that combine their real lives with their virtual ones, and the aftermath of it all. It gets its humor from playing upon the extremes of the gaming culture, but in a more diverse group of players. The unique aspect of The Guild is that it shows how decisions inside the game affects things in reality for the players as well as the people in the player’s surrounding environment. Although Day’s depiction of people was a bit extreme, for people that have never experienced and MMORPG, it gives a nice preview of the actual population base.
4. Rebuttal
With the Internet becoming more socially normal as the years go by, over 80% of the American population is online and 33% of users participate in online games (Shen and Williams, 124-125).There is a much larger user base that participates in the game culture that society does not get to see, with MMORPG subscriptions at over 47 million (White. 2008). Shaw correlates this to media’s misrepresentation of the gamer, “the stereotype of the gamers as a glazed, incoherent teenage boy is wrong” (Shaw, 407). She also attributes the male dominance in media to the exclusion of women in texts, however in a recent survey from Zoe Fox at Mashable shows the there are actually more female online gamers then male, 55% to 45% respectively. According to a study by Cole and Griffith, the demographic mean of the culture is about 23 years old and large minority of them being college students.
Zhi-Jin Zhong refutes the claim that gamers are anti-social and isolated by saying “playing MMORPGs is not a solitary activity but very much a social experiences”. MMORPGs often focus more so on “collective play and other forms of social interactions” (Zhong, p. 2352) and online participants tend to be more social then those offline (Fox, 2011). When players sign on, the players they interact with in the virtual world are not just computers, but actually human beings on the other end.
[E]very single player is able to create unique experiences within the same MMO, it is essential to consider the multitude of motivations and activities and their respective impact, rather than to assume that game play is a homogeneous causal agent.(Shen and Williams)
Three quarters of the culture have admitted to having made “good friends” in the gaming community and about half of all gamers say that their relationship in game are comparable with the ones in real-life (Cole and Griffith, 575-577). Many of the participants also admitted that they tended to discuss personal matters with online friends then real-life ones (Cole and Griffith, 582). The online community provides a safe haven of sorts, a place that social interactions can take place under different societal rules away from the prejudices of real life. People play games to relieve stress, alleviate boredom, and take a mental break, connecting with other is just a nice bonus (Fox, 2011).
To counter the idea that MMORPG participants are obese men living in their mother’s basements we take a further look into some of our studies mentioned already. From Fox we pull that there are more female gamers with over 60% of those being married or in a serious relationship. Over 51% percent of the community holds jobs, with a mere 2% are unemployed (Cole and Griffith). The participants of the community carry on their individual lives in the real world and the idea many are obsessed with the game is completely unrealistic. Many of societies assumptions about MMORPG players are complete skewed because of viral video’s effect on the masses. My high school history professor once said that “a lie can travel around the world twice before the truth even ties its shoes” and so it is in this case. Videos like “The Greatest Freak Out Ever” spreads like a virus to the entire Internet, while the true gaming culture stays confined in a closed network.
5. Conclusion
Viral media has had a drastic effect on the image of the gaming culture. Social stereotypes combined with the development of Youtube has created a flux of viral videos that in general get passed on as humorous artifacts, but in hindsight also lays out an image of the gamer that proves not to be completely accurate. My own time inside this community has shown me a lot about how wrong these stereotypes are. I came in half expecting kids with anger issues, but was surprised to find that I was one of the younger players in the community.
Since then I have been taking a semi-active role with in the community, mixing with different social circles. The things I have witnessed have been astonishing. There were more couples that played then I had expected, people were not all complete jerks, and there were more female players then I had anticipated. I start this research paper with beliefs that the social stereotypes were completely off, but had my doubts. Though after some research I was glad to find to evidence to support my claim.
I had an interesting conversation with some online friend and we came onto a interesting conclusion. The image of video gamers to society today is like the image of Dungeon & Dragons players to the video gamers. Each view negatively of the other based upon stereotype established by the “real-world” culture.
The best piece of information I found was Shaw’s theory that “there is a truth-based stereotype of gamer identity that is being changed, not challenged.” The idea of the gamer is still a relatively new idea to society, but as new technology emerges and there is a more widespread convergence of gaming.There will always be stereotypes, but stereotypes aren’t always accurate andhopefully people will stop taking these stereotypes as fact and make their own opinions.
Bibliography
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Radoff, Jon. “History of Social Games.” Weblog entry. Jon Radoff’s Internet Wonderland. 24 May 2010. 11 December 2011 (
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