Gamers as Community 

A Literacy of Gaming

The metacommunity of gamers is largely comprised of these smaller, more tangible communities of guilds and parties, and together they form what Deans (2003) defined as a “discourse community.” In general, gamers are “a group of people who are unified by similar patterns of language use, shared assumptions, common knowledge, and parallel habits of interpretation” (Deans, 2003, p. 136). Gaming syntax does not change much from the standard language of its players; however, gamers do use terms that non-gamers would not recognize, like n00b, pwned, and L337. These terms help define the “insiders” of the gaming community and allow gamers to create a stronger sense of community.

More importantly, however, being part of the discourse community of gamers grants access to transnational cultural literacies because video games can transcend geopolitical and cultural borders. In their observations of two gamers who grew up outside of the United States, Iswari P. Pandey, Laxman Pandey, and Angish Shreshtha (2007) explored how, “Gaming can be an important venue to acquire and immerse in cultural literacy” (p. 47). Playing video games not only offers common grounds for conversational engagement—as was the case for the gamers discussed in Pandey et al. (2007)—but also provides opportunities for transnational teamwork. Gamer Josh Gardiner explained how his online gaming experience allowed him to acquire “cultural and linguistic literacies” (Selfe, Mareck, & Gardiner, 2007, p. 25):

[You can] learn another language, or pick up on dialects or ethnic backgrounds, or recent events in the news.  You can learn lots from gaming in my opinion….

I’ve picked up on French, not a lot of Italian, I know a little Dutch.  I play with people a lot so I’ve picked up on a lot of their words that they use fluently over the microphone and I’ll use them with them or if I’m playing so they understand me a little bit easier. (Selfe et al., 2007, p. 25)

While not all experience with video games offers transnational communication opportunities like Gardiner’s, video games themselves offer players with the chance to experience new worlds and civilizations, exposing them to a variety of cultural norms and codes.  This experience affords gamers with the opportunity to at least understand the potential for new cultures beyond their own.

Gamers also participate in James Paul Gee’s (2007) definition of a “semiotic domain”: “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings” (p.19).  The semiotic domain of gamers is decidedly multimodal.  In addition to the oral communication that occurs between two gamers sitting on the couch together, gamers’ “social language” includes communicating via online forums, in blogs and vlogs, through headset conversations, and with instant messaging.  Moreover, the simple act of gaming requires players to interact with various mediums as players simultaneously react to texts, images, audio files, and videos while applying hands-on reactions through controllers and keyboards.  Gaming is essentially a full-body experience that gamers of all forms can recognize.

And while there are many different types of video games, the modalities of gaming translate easily between consoles, games, and players in what Erin Smith and Eve Deitsch (2007) called a “metalevel understanding of how games work in a general way” (p. 57).  People who play first-person shooters and role-playing games may disagree on the definition of “RPG,” [1] for instance, but both know how to recognize “NPCs” [2] or move a character through a mini-map.  In other words, gamers are socially adept at conversing with one another because they have a shared literacy of video games.  They know how game physics work, the importance of interacting with other characters, and the desire to obtain better loot by somehow defeating a game’s biggest challenge.

Each game also has a unique literacy that must be mastered by the player.  This literacy frequently involves “reading” narratives, negotiating a perceived landscape, and learning to read symbols unknown to the gamer’s alphanumeric native tongue.  While learning these systems and negotiations, gamers are able to make meaning and communicate with one another in order to solve problems within the game’s kingdom.  And as Gee further explained, learning how to negotiate through this semiotic domain allows gamers to participate in “active learning.”  That is, playing video games requires “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning” (2007, p.24).  Gaming literacy is not only multimodal, therefore, but also actively evolves as players learn to interpret new data and form social alliances in order to problem solve and prepare for future encounters.