Lets Get Together

Gaming culture is vast and wonderful. I’ve been part of gaming cultures all of my life. I consider myself as a ‘’gamer’’. It’s a state of mind, a lifestyle. I’m going to tell you about some of the gaming cultures I’ve been in throughout my life, in no particular order.

I was once a regular member at a cybercafé. There were always the regulars there. It was perhaps the geekiest part of my life, ever. We called each other by our gamer tags. We used to play Warcraft 3, Counter-Strike, Battlefield 2 and many other games. It was very competitive, but still, very fun. Every now and again we used to hold competitions at the cybercafé. At one point I was part of a clan for CS:S. There were about 7 of us in the clan and we used to enter online tournaments all the time. We even paid money, each month to have our own server running. When I used to make levels for CS:S, the clan would beta test them for me on the server. It helped me to refine the maps so that they played better. I remember those days, I used to have a lot of fun, and I felt part of a close community.

More recently I have gone over into the realm of the online gaming community. MMORPG’s never really tickled my fancy; I was more of a first person shooter player. Xbox live created an online community, and the invention of ‘’the friend’s list’’ brought about a new meaning to the words: gaming culture. Instead of going to a cybercafé to meet up with my friends I would simply log online and play with them. I made some close friends that I never saw in person. I created a persona for each of them in my head. The use of the Xbox-live head set made things much more fun. Let’s put it this way; I learned all the possible swearword and cuss combinations in the English language, and some in other languages to. It was a hive of filthy people playing games with each other; what more could you ask. But of course there were always the few individuals out to ruin the fun for everyone else. You would get the occasional berk being racist, excessively swearing, and team-killing everyone. We hated these people and most of the time kicked them out of the game, chucked them off of our friends list, or ganged up on them until they left the server. It is people like this that can ruin the image of some gaming cultures.

More recently, me and my friends at university have been going to the Demon Gamers (The De’Montfort Gaming Society), were we play all sorts of games. It is kind of reminiscent of the times I used to spend at the cybercafé when I was younger. Sometimes we even have parties where we link up 4 TV’s and 4 Xbox’s at our flats. I’ve now become part of a new gaming culture here at DMU.

Writing this brings back memories I had put out of my mind long ago. It is very euphoric!