It's Thursday night, just after 11pm, and Brent (or rather, "[HEMP]theEnigma") is blasting away at his buddies in Quake III Arena (Q3A). This is a regular pastime for the 31-year-old computer science student. He averages about 10 hours of gaming a week, though he's been known to clock twice that sometimes. For him, it's not only a fun way to let off steam. It's his community. Or rather, his "clan."
Clans are associations of players who play regularly with and against each other. They are invitation only clubs and players will often spend quite a bit of time honing their skills in order to be noticed by one of the more elite clans.
Brent has been a member of the [HEMP] clan for a few months now and his memory of his invitation has an almost romantic nostalgia about it. "I was playing on a Quake 3 Capture the Flag server called 'The House that Tribe Built', hosted by Wicked Tribe (a guy, not a clan, though he might have had a clan once). I beat the crap out of the other team, including [HEMP]Intimidator (aka [HEMP]Spyder2600), and soon after he asked if I wanted to join the clan."
Clans provide the gamer with a group of friends as well as an additional challenge to improve their skills. "Being good and being in a clan means you get extra attention and when you're good with the instant-kill weapon...they accuse you of being a bot and stuff," says Brent.
His real-life friend Andrew is also a gamer and a computer science student. Andrew's game of choice is a multi-player modification (or "mod") of Half-Life called Counterstrike. He's a member of a clan called [ASoB] (though he won't tell me what it stands for) and averages about 15-20 hours of gaming per week. His interaction with the players in his clan has spilled over into real life meetings and activities.
Recently, he invited a member of his clan from Ottawa to stay at his home in Toronto for five days. It was the first time they had met in person.
This type of offline camaraderie is common, although players from the same clan can be separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles. These new communities are an unintended side effect of the combination of 3D-engine driven first person shooter games with the proliferation of broadband internet access. Another side effect has been a thriving community of open source programmers who contribute hundreds of hours of work for nothing to create "mods" for their favourite games, which are distributed freely and without charge.
Though games like Q3A and Unreal Tournament can be played in single player mode, against computer-generated opponents called bots, most players prefer the challenge of facing real human opponents. It's not out of a desire to hurt or kill real people, as the vibrant communities and elaborate forms of etiquette can confirm. After a particularly hard-fought game, everyone uses the in-game "chat" function to send messages like "GG" (good game) to each other. Players appreciate the unpredictability and increasing skill of human opponents, and like any adversaries, there is a respect among gamers, especially for the guy who keeps "fragging" you mercilessly. Luckily, once killed, a player magically "respawns" seconds later, allowing him (or, less often, her) to rejoin the fray anew.
Friendships forged in the arena are remarkably similar to any other friendships. When asked if members of the clan communicate outside of the game and about what subjects, Brent lists email and ICQ as the preferred means of communication, and the topics can range from strictly game stuff to "computers of course, but also philosophy, girls, careers, and all that sort of stuff."
There are even conventions, like QuakeCon, taking place from August 8-12 in Mesquite, Texas. Among the news items on the homepage were photos of gamers arriving and stories about sharing homemade Jambalaya. This could very well have been a convention of stamp collectors. The remarkable thing about online multiplayer gaming is not the flashy 3D graphics or the adrenaline-pumping gameplay. It's the way these arenas of battle have become gathering places for friendships to form.
Even amid the carnage.