Online gaming creates a competitive or collaborative environment over the internet for people to interact with one another. Online gaming often includes activities to achieve a task set by a game and enhanced with verbal and/or visual communication (Maher, 2016). It creates a virtual environment that allows single or multiple players to interact with one another to play games online. However, the online gaming community is not restricted to the online collaboration of multi-player games. It also includes individuals who play single player games who interact over online platforms such as social media (Affendi, 2008). This not only includes video game play, but also the broader ecosystem of online gaming communities, which includes platforms for watching others play, gamer commentary, and chat features where viewers interact with one another. User-generated content, such as the comments made by popular streamers during game play and comments posted by observers of this game play in the “chat” feature, all are part of the online gaming environment.
There are different types of online video games, which influence the behaviors of the gamers based on the environments they create.Games that are violent can tend to make the user angry and less empathetic, whereas other games can make the user more relaxed. Content creators influence the behaviors of online gamers based on the environment they create. Content creators can persuade their audience and teach them new beliefs that can change the user’s environment.
Two common types of games found online are sandbox games and shooter games:
A “sandbox game” is a game that puts minimal character restrictions on a gamer, such that the gamer is allowed to roam freely, explore, interact and change the virtual world at will. Sandbox games tend to be more creative, friendly, educational and calming. Examples of Sandbox games include Minecraft, Scrap Mechanic and Kerbal Space Program. In Minecraft, for example, players explore a virtual world, collect different types of resources, mine minerals, harvest crops and construct houses or even cities.
While “shooter games” are multiplayer, online, battle arena or real time strategy games. They create environments that bring out the negative behaviors of gamers. These games tend to require guns, are more violent, are bloody and gory, and create, at times, unneeded conflicts and aggressive behaviors. Examples of Shooter Games include Valorant, Call of Duty, Halo Infinite and Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal, for example, is packed with grisly violence, aggravated gameplay and an industrial, thrash-inspired soundtrack. Players use heavy artillery like shotguns, chainsaws or even rocket launchers to kill demons with gory graphics and brutalize each other in the game’s combat-heavy arena sections.
Citations:
Affendi, S. M. (2008). Understanding the virtual community of gamers. Encyclopedia of Networked and Virtual Organizations, Information Science Reference, 1714.
Maher, B. (2016). Good gaming: scientists are helping to tame toxic behaviour in the worlds most popular online game. Nature, 531(7596), 568-572.
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