Worth Gaming for Dear friends and students of UTA, I humbly come to you with a simple argument, one that is close to my heart. Though it may sound trivial, the argument has been raging on for three decades, and has grown to a nation wide debate. The question: is there such thing as a gaming community? Again, the question may sound inconsequential, but consider this fellow Mavericks, what makes a community? Is it just a group of people meeting and having a good time? Or is it more?

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Is something like gaming able to unite people from all across the world? Admittedly, the argument is rather close to my heart. I have been interested games since the age of five. I remember my uncle playing Starcraft fourteen years ago, and being transfixed by cutting edge graphics. It is a culture that existed before I was born, and continues to expand. Within the past few years, it has burst into the main stream of entertainment, competing with the likes of cinema and TV. How can a group of people who have never met, form such a complex society?

How can a hobby inspire people around the world to this level of fanaticism? The gaming society can shine some light on societies and how they function as a whole. The gaming community is surely a legitimate community. According to 1UP, a prominent gaming magazine, a community needs three things: culture, moral code and organization. The gaming community has all three. Its culture is rich and complex. To be a gamer, you must learn the gamer language: a language with roots in English Japanese, and many others. It includes a large amount of acronyms, and made up words such as DPS, bakka, 1337, and many others.

A gamer most also have extensive knowledge of many important games such as Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, and Halo. The community also has loose, but universal laws that most gamers abide by. Trolling, or intentionally causing distress to other gamers for pleasure is seen as a blight to all gaming communities and will usually result in mass disapproval or even banning. In terms of organization, it is perhaps not as strong as a community based upon physical land, but what it lacks in town hall meetings and elections, it makes up in conventions and LAN tournaments.

The gaming community boasts large gaming conventions such as PAX, and E3, where thousands of gamers meet and socialize while playing the newest games. LAN is Local Area Network, which is used to hold massive tournaments where many can pit themselves against other gamers. These Colosseums are where the celebrities of the gaming world are born, rising from the bodies of the hundreds they had slain to win. There is no law keeping force, or governing body to be sure, but it is still a community that can have an impact on the world. The gaming community is not a legitimate community.

It is not legitimate due to its lack of due to its lack of organization. It may claim to be united but there is little evidence to prove it. The community is too broken; there is division with consoles, whether an Xbox or a PC is better. There is division on the genre of games such as shooting games, role playing games and puzzle games. The communities are too far apart to be a single gaming community. Take a look at the most played game in the world, League of Legends . It has little to no tie with the popular fighting game genre,and it is at war with people that play Heroes of Newerth.

Nasty internet quarrels, forum raids and other attacks have gone between the two communities as chronicled in Nigma’s The HoN community – how bad is it. These are just one of many civil wars that are being fought among the so called “gaming community”. There is just too much division between the scattered fan boy tribes that there cannot be a community. The culture of gaming is weak. The lingo and knowledge is too different between gaming factions to be called a gaming community. People that play modern games such as Call of Duty are unlikely to remember older games such as Metroid Prime.

In short, what would the community is too spread apart to be called such. The gaming community exists because they believe to exist. The people of the gaming community believe that they are a community,what is there to stop them from becoming one? Sure they may have petty fights and many may not know the culture and the lore. Does this stop the community from proclaiming their existence? No. When the gaming community spoke out against SOPA and PIPA, the whole gaming community as shown in “Why PC Gamer objects to SOPA and PIPA” .

The League of Legends community did not support the bill just because the Heroes of Newerth community was against it. The retro gamers as well as the new gamers gave millions to a group of game developers when they decided they were sick of producers telling them what to do. It is true that the many tribes of the gaming community can make them seem weak and unorganized; but when given a purpose, they are as strong as any other. In prominent editorials and magazines, they refer to gamers not by the game they play, they refer to them as the gaming community.

When the New York Times calls the mass of gamers around the world the gaming community, their right to exist was just a bit more validated. All three arguments agree on the fact that people believe in a gamer community. The rest is complete opposite of one another. The first argument states that it is a gamer community because it has culture, a moral code, and organization. The second argument claims that the gamer community does not exist as the organization is too frail for it to even have a culture and moral code.

Both assume that they are correct and the other is wrong. The intersection between the first and the third is that they both agree that the gaming community exists. What they do not agree on is what makes a community. The first states that culture, moral code, and organization make a community. The third makes a claim that the gamer community exists because gamers believe it exists. So, there are three arguments good people of UTA. Choose your side, or make a side yourself. Can the gamers truly call themselves a community? Is it just a word that holds no meaning? Perhaps I can persuade you in my next report.

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