From Reddit to Sea of Thieves to Grand Theft Auto: how online games are shaped by the communities that use them

The now inactive page once hosted a large red button at the top of its feed next to a 60-second countdown timer. Each individual user could only press the button once, an action that would then reset the countdown.

After just over two months, the countdown reached zero for the first time - when no users pressed the button before the 60 seconds were up. As a result, the button was archived and closed to further activity, having served no apparent purpose.

Both the place and the button bore witness to an inane tribalism among the users that seemed to manifest out of the online sauce itself.

If a user pressed the button during a specific ten-second interval, they were assigned a colored "flair" next to their username, feeding into a manufactured hierarchy of factions within the community.

While loyalty forms these factions, a sense of community and belonging sustains them.

But this corruption isn't always a negative tribalism.

Crafting new conversation

In games, interactivity exists on a scale of what a virtual world's developer will allow.

If a developer offers more freedom to their users, they offer more ways for users to interact with each other and the world according to users' own goals and objectives.

In the virtual worlds of first-person shooter video games (think Call of Duty or Halo) gamers know an allured player crouching down and then standing up repeatedly is trying to say hello.

In the absence of any ability to have their online avatar literally wave hello, players have circumvented the limits of the virtual space to do it anyway.

Users have manipulated and circumvented the rules of this world in order to fulfil any number of parallel – or even opposing – purposes based on their own needs and desires.

Shaping our own worlds

In a conversation I once had with Adelaide-based narrative designer and game developer Damon Reece, I asked Damon what game they were enjoying lately.

In this game, players are expected to play the role of a cutthroat pirate in competition with other marauding bands of pirates.

In video game terminology, an “open-world game” like Sea of Thieves is a virtual world open to the free-roaming of its players.

This freedom means the possibilities of these worlds are dictated by the communities that occupy them as much as it is by the developers that build them.

In Grand Theft Auto V (2013), the highest grossing media product of all time, players are meant to focus their efforts on building their own criminal empire.

However, the online metropolis also plays host to communities of car meets, police role-players, photographers, social clubs, filmmakers and protesters.

Some of these are intended consequences of the game’s robust design – but most are the result of like-minded individuals collectively shaping their shared online spaces.
Across a broad spectrum of virtual worlds, users have, time and again, repurposed the space to suit their needs.
Online spaces, just like offline ones, evolve to meet the demands of their use.
Where these online spaces diverge from their offline counterparts is in their global accessibility and their almost total anonymity.
It is difficult to imagine a democratic space occupied not by faces or bodies but by usernames and avatars, yet this is precisely the form of democracy offered by virtual worlds.