Background

To begin, I thought I’d write a brief history of my gaming experiences and the reasons for my interest in interaction in competitive online multiplayer games. My first serious online gaming experience began when I was 14. The game was Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (henceforth, Turok). This was a fairly standard First Person Shooter (FPS), with progressive net coding which allowed people with even very bad internet connections play without much detriment to their experience. However, the game had sub-par graphics for its time, and never had good support from the publisher. As a result, the community was never as large as many of the more popular online games, and dwindled progressively as the game got older. What the community lacked in size, however, it more than made up for in closeness and enthusiasm. This resulted in people staying with the game far longer than would be expected. I played Turok for about 2 years before moving on. My next game of choice was Half-Life: Counter-Strike (CS). This was initially a free, fan-made modification (mod) of Half-Life which quickly surpassed the official game in popularity. Its community was proportionally gigantic, and most times I played, I played with people I had never seen and would never see again in a game. I stopped playing CS about a month before I came to college. Though I still played occasionally, mostly with hall-mates who also played the game, this was limited to one or two times a month, not even close to the amount I played during high school. For the next two years I played mostly console games with my friends, and stayed away from online gaming. However, for my 20^th birthday (September 2005), two of my friends bought me Warcraft III (WC3), so that I could play with them. Since then I have, fairly actively, played another fan-made mod of WC3, called Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars (DotA). This game has a much larger community than did Turok but not nearly as big as that of CS, striking a good balance and rounding out my online gaming experience. Interactions with other players have been different in each game as well, but I will write more on that at a later time.