Community Formation in Digital Games

• Duration: 2023 – 2026
• Project lead: Dr. Dom Ford

Post-Doc Project

Much research in game studies has focused on game communities and their effects on people and society. But with this project I argue that we need a better theoretical grounding for how game communities form, and how they are then negotiated and maintained. What are the forces, influences and affordances that shape this process?

I focus on a triangular relationship between the game as an artefact which shapes the forms of agency that are possible and incentivised, the role of the developers in helping, hindering, nurturing or ignoring communities of players, and the ways in which players themselves communicate. This involves also a focus on the digital platforms they use to communicate. Rarely do game communities exist only ‘within’ the game itself, rather they organise on Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and so on, which each shape the formation and negotiation of community in different ways.

This project focuses on three case studies.

1. The Old School RuneScape community. A rebooted older version of the MMORPG RuneScape, Old School is now developed in close collaboration with the community using a unique form of player democracy: updates are voted on and must receive 70% support or greater to be implemented into the game. This leads to players and developers alike campaigning for or against particular updates on the basis of the nebulous concept of ‘Old School-ness’.
2. The community surrounding FromSoftware games. Often summarised by a so-called ‘git gud’ (a rendering of ‘get good’) mentality, in which the uncompromising difficulty of these games becomes a focal point for community bonds; new players who complain about the difficulty or ask for easy solutions to challenges are stereotypically told instead to simply ‘git gud’. Charitably, this discourse is seen as a refreshing approach in game design whereby players must put in time and effort to overcome challenges and improve themselves in the process, with no excuses or shortcuts. Some in popular discourse have likened the games’ difficulty in this way to meaningfully representing the experience of overcoming severe depression. Others see this discourse as emblematic of toxic gamer culture which fetishises difficulty and gatekeeps its community on that basis, and which denounces accessibility options in games as making games ‘too easy’.
3. A comparison between The Witcher and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, focusing on how each game leverages its developer’s national heritage in very different ways, and how the game communities respond to that. Kingdom Come is a game set in central Bohemia in 1403. Much of the game’s marketing emphasises the developer’s tireless commitment to historical accuracy and authenticity, though this claim has come under criticism, and its success is partly attributed to this authenticity. By contrast, The Witcher game series (and the series more broadly) is explicitly fantastical and not based in any specific locale, and yet is still considered as a quintessentially Polish world.