Connected Communities: How Meaning and Identity are Socially Constructed in the Destiny Gamespace

Dr. Matt Cox Submitted on 12/14/2014

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Introduction

Since Magnavox first released the Odyssey in 1972,videogames have become a staple of home entertainment across the world. Studies purport that, as of 2011, over half (58%) of households in the United States owned at least one videogame console (Graziano 2012). Much like society has evolved over time, so have videogames. Long gone is the era of 8-bit solitary gaming; in its place reside photorealistic visual arenas that unite millions of users across the globe in shared virtual experiences. Videogames have become highly involved community-driven experiences that allow individuals to discover new ways of constructing meaning and identifying themselves as active members in an ever-growing culture. However, there is arguably an existing reluctance on behalf of the academy to embrace pop-culture centric genres as not being of educational merit. This mosaic essay aims to advocate that, using the aforementioned as its central premise, the gaming community (and other emergent communities) serve as exemplars for legitimately incorporating modern digitized culture into our studies of community and rhetoric.

How I Came to Identify as a Gamer

My first experience with videogames occurred when I was eight years old. My father, who spent most of his waking moments engaged with his work, had recently left for a business trip overseas. My mother had decided to travel with him, and arranged for me to stay with my grandmother for two weeks. This was the longest duration of time that I had ever spent away from my parents, and my mother purchased me a Nintendo Game Boy to ensure that I remained occupied while they were gone. It was not long before I found myself immersed in new virtual worlds, vicariously embarking on new adventures and exploring possibilities not afforded by reality. This would serve as the foundation of a long and involved relationship. As time progressed, I worked actively to stay current with developing videogame technologies. I have owned near every home console released during my lifetime, and invest numerous hours prowling the parameters of cyberspace. I have competed in tournaments, participated in pre-release beta testing, and been a participant in gaming-driven forums and social networks. In regards to the context of Destiny, I have registered a collective 200 hours within the gamespace and, both solitarily and with other players, engaged in every activity that space provides.

Explaining the Destiny Gamespace

Destiny is a videogame that was developed by Bungie (Halo) and produced by Activision (Call of Duty). It was released in 2014, and has been classified as a multiplayer online role-playing first-person shooter. First-person refers to the perspective through which players interact with the gamespace, while shooter implies that the

Griffin 2 majority of gamespace interactions center on gunplay (See fig. 1-2). Players assume the role of one of the few remaining guardians, an individual who is tasked with saving the last bastion of society from the ever-growing threat of the forces of darkness. The player determines the race, gender, and appearance of their character. The player also chooses one of three available classes which each encompasses their own specialized sets of skills and abilities. The warlock, for instance, possesses the ability to control destructive magical energies while the titan acts as a defender that can shield friendly players from aggressive computer-controlled enemy forces. The game operates on a level system; this means that the more one engages with the gamespace, the more customization and play options will be made available to them. In other words, a level five player will not be able to engage with the space to the extent that a level 20 player would. At any point, players can partner with up to six others as they tackle a wide variety of game-posed challenges. Along the way, new weapons and abilities become available, which allows the player to customize their experience to meet their individual desires. As such, Destiny encourages participants to cultivate their own styles of play as they interact with others to overcome challenges and defeat the evil that threatens their existence.

(Fig. 1-2: Destiny in-game screenshots captured from the perspectives of the user)

Establishing the World of Destiny as a Community

For this essay to truly realize its argument, it must first establish that players of Destiny interact like members of a distinct and specialized community. In order to do this, I draw attention to communities of practice, an ideology set forth by social theorist Etienne Wenger (1998). Wenger hypothesizes that communities revolve around three core concepts:

Domain This encompasses the shared body of interest to which membership in the CoP mandates commitment. The domain may or may not hold value outside of the CoP. Community This refers to the establishing of communicative relationships and the open sharing of information between members. Wenger feels this level of interaction to be essential. Practice

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This illustrates the collaboration of resources and experiences that Wenger purports to unite and influence CoP members as practicioners. (Wenger et.al)

In terms of Destiny, the domain is quite clear. The shared body of interest is the provided gamespace, within which all other player interactions take place. Domain is realized through the players themselves, as they routinely interact via forums and social networking sites to share information pertinent to the gamespace. Community is embraced by Destinys multiplayer nature, which forces social interaction if its true potential is wished to be realized. Practice, in this case, is fairly self-explanatory; players interact with what is made available by the game and, subsequently, share their experiences with each other to construct a commutative understanding of what normative occupation of the gamespace entails. What results is a community-constructed experience, where members interact with one-another to create unique, socially influenced encounters that differ greatly from player to player.

How Ethos Functions in the Destiny Gamespace

` When examining how meaning and identity are communally constructed within Destiny, it is imperative that one understands how the Aristotelian notion of ethos influences both entities. Scholar S. Michael Halloran provides an accessible and comprehensive definition of the classic rhetorical appeal, stating that an individuals level of authority and character affects how their argumentative claims are perceived by their audience (Halloran 1982). In other words, an individuals credibility directly relates to their persuasive capacity. With the Destiny gamespace being community-driven, participants who hold ethos are able to significantly shape how others interact within it. Let us now examine how members of the Destiny community establish ethos. Perhaps the most immediately identifiable indicator of player ethos is their character level. As was mentioned earlier, Destiny assigns levels to each participant that are reflective of their acquired experience within the gamespace. Players gain experience through completing tasks in mission scenarios, skirmishing against other players, and discovering rare items. While level 20 is the highest level one can obtain through experience alone, players can complete other requirements to advance their character to level 30. These conditions are staunchly more difficult to achieve, which greatly enhances the perceived authority of players who are able to do so. Players can also obtain ethos through carefully considering how they outfit their character avatars. Destiny implements an inspect system; this system allows participants to explore through inventories of others at the push of a button, which enables them to closely scrutinize one-anothers customization choices. While this may seem insignificant to nonpartisans, it provides members of the community ways to assess the experience levels of others without any verbalized communication. Certain weapons and armors can only be obtained through completion of difficult game activities, while some mandate time-consuming gamespace interaction in order to acquire. Each piece of gear in Destiny is also color-coded in accordance to its established rarity, which immediately correlates

Griffin 4 quality and quantity; in other words, if a player has an abundance of gear classified as legendary or exotic, then they deductively possess a certain level of credibility within the community (See fig. 3-4).

(Fig 3-4: The respective inventories of a high ethos (lvl. 30) and low ethos (lvl. 8) Hunter. Here, it can be observed how rarity of gear correlates with how identity and ethos are situated. )

Building Theoretical Bridges

When examining these two main determinants of ethos in the Destiny gamespace, it can be argued that one entity functions quintessentially in bothknowledge. To state it differently, knowledge is the base from which the powers of ethos influence evolve; it is what allows meanings to be made and subsequently conveyed. In the context of Destiny, ethos is the byproduct of experience. That experience is what results in the development of knowledge. Many postmodern scholars have displayed an interest in this power-knowledge dichotomy (Foucault, Gordon, Delanty). It has been theorized that knowledge grants power to those who possess it because it enables them to control it; these individuals have the ability to shape and influence the meanings that are constructed by those who lack their knowledge. This premise can be historically observed. For instance, consider Guttenbergs first printing of the bible in 1455. Prior to this moment, the text of the bible was only available in Latin, which few people outside of the elite could read. This allowed the Catholic Church to wield immense power, because only they had access to the contextual knowledge. Therefore, they could sculpt the way they presented that knowledge to the masses in such a way that the desired interpretations would be constructed and established. When this knowledge became more readily available, it allowed for the making of deviant meanings and, resultantly, a noteworthy loss of power for institutionalized religion (Shilling 2005). This essay will hereby refer to the acquisition of knowledge within the Destiny gamespace as Destiny Literacy.

In Destiny, there is a substantial power-gap between literate and non-literate participants. A level five character does not have access to the same game features as a level 26-30 character. To provide a base example, higher levels unlock items and gear that are only relevant to the gamespace interactions players at those levels would

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undertake. Without access to this knowledge, lower level players must rely on those in superior positions of identity to explain how these items are to be acquired and manipulated. This does nothing if not perpetuate the status quo, and the emergence of new meaning is heavily restricted.

Connective Reflections: My Initial Experience with the Vault of Glass

Perhaps the most prestigiously revered element of the Destiny gamespace is the Vault of Glass (VoG). By modern role-playing game nomenclature, the VoG is classified as a raid. A raid is an in-game scenario that drastically alters normative gameplay by greatly enhancing difficulty and incorporating unique foundational mechanics (see attached video). Gamespaces often require that players reach a certain level before they can participate in a raid, which reinforces the separation instigated by player literacies. Defeating the challenges set forth by the raid rewards players with exclusive gear that further elevates their ethos in the eyes of the community elite. A unique aspect of the VoG is that it does not incorporate a matchmaking system. A matchmaking system is a tool that multiplayer gamespaces use to partner up similarly experienced players to play with or against each other in a particular game scenario. Destiny not employing such a tool in its raid is worthy of note, because it effectively increases the exclusivity of player community at higher experience levels. To compensate for the absence of matchmaking, community members have created membership-required forum websites for the purposes of soliciting participation. Posters on forums set rigid specifications as to the types of members they will allow in their raid communities. In the case of Destiny, players often will often discriminate on grounds of character level, character class, armament choices, physical location, spoken language, and access to voice communications. My personal experience with user-created forums has been reminiscent of theoretical posits made by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983). Through engagement with these spaces I observed the creation of numerous smaller communities, each of them established around the shared perspectives of their members. Each thread creator held their own prototype for what constituted acceptable candidacy, and players of similar persuasions slowly sequestered themselves away in ever-smaller publics. Confined, high-ethos camps are essentially controlling the transmission of valued knowledge. In order to obtain this knowledge, one must assimilate to the expectations held by the community they seek to join.

Griffin 6 After spending about 45 minutes searching for a community to play with, I was able to start the VoG. Within moments, it became easily observable as to which players were contesting for ethos in the gamespace. The group leader, a level 30 player, immediately initiated dialectic with a level 29 player regarding which strategies the group would implement. After coming to a consensus, they assigned roles to the other members of the community, none of whom were using characters higher than level 28. If those roles were not followed, the leader had the authority to remove individuals of his choosing from the community. The sheer threat of exclusion from the raid group appeared to be a sufficient motivator for players to demonstrate accepted behaviors, as each member did as they were directed. Destiny arguably gives players no choice in the matterthe raid differs so vastly from the normative gamespace that it cannot be successfully completed without accepting the meanings constructed by those with ethos. Thus, the same knowledge will be continually passed down to future players as they engage with the VoG. In Language as Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke describes his concept of terministic screens (1966). These entities function as lenses that shape how individuals perceive the contexts they are a part of, and are constructed through past experiences and innate biases. When considering the raid, this phenomenon is very much existent within the Destiny gamespace; its restriction of knowledge has created a highly specialized community mindset that prevents the acceptance of new meanings that do not conform to their own. As long as these screens are in effect, assessing player literacy in Destiny will be based upon the ideology constructed by those who bare the power of ethos.

How Competitive Multiplayer Further Constructs Identity and Meaning Until this point, this essay has considered how meaning and identity are influenced through user interaction with cooperative-play gamespace elements. Now, it aims to explore how this socialized construction occurs within competitive-play gamespace environments. The community has classified these spaces as peer versus peer (PvP) multiplayer arenas. Destinys PvP gamespaces place up to 12 individuals in distinct arenas (maps) where they compete against each other to accomplish game-assigned individual and team objectives. By there very nature, these spaces revolve around ethos; they enable players to directly impose their authority and knowledge over others in order to further the promotion of their own identity. Player performance is evaluated by the gamespace, with statistics and other assessment information displayed after each match has been completed. Destiny also uses slight visual clues in transitioning cinematics that draw emphasis to the player that it views as being the most accomplished (See fig. 5)

(Fig. 5, Pre-Match Cinematic: The player avatar wielding his/her teams flag is chosen by gamespace algorithms that are designed to assess player ability. Being selected lends ethos to player identity.)

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Clans and Their Rhetorical Function in Destiny

Scholars have discussed in notable detail how user need for simulated belonging and interaction in virtual spaces impacts the formation of identity and meaning (Gee, Turkle, Squire et. al, Yee). These desired notions often result in the development of micro-communities that hybridize with the larger domain. In competitive multiplayer gamespaces, it is not uncommon to witness the emergence of clans. Clans are small player-created communities that, while still viewing Destiny as their domain of interest, often hold shared values that transcend the game itself. Clans often construct themselves around perceived identity, drawing upon notions of nationality, gender, political affiliations, and value. Players in clans often adopt insignias that readily identify their membership. These indicators are displayed for all users, which further situates player identity. Clans are often exclusive, occupying restricted-access gamespaces and only engaging in interactions that encourage the promotion of their clan identity.

In Destiny, a player must petition to a clan leader should they desire to obtain membership. Various clans employ different screening processes, and existing members decide mutually as to whether or not they will bestow membership upon a prospective candidate. Often times, things like player level, gamespace experience, and gear quality are grounds for scrutiny. Examination of such processes suggests that player ethos is being evaluated by those who perceive themselves in authority, which underpins the socially constructed meanings the gamespace creates. Once a clan community has accepted a player, that clans insignia is displayed on the users playercard. Playercards display the users gamespace name, clan affiliations, and player level, and are visible to all participants within the gamespace (See fig. 6). Membership acquisition enables users to access specific gamespace features, such as nominating other members for commendation and competitively engaging with members of other clans. Destiny also rewards players for tackling certain cooperative challenges, such as the VoG, with members of their clan communities.

Connective Reflections: Getting Hands-On with the Iron Banner It is not uncommon for multiplayer gamespaces to feature occasional competitive tournaments. These events often modify traditional gamespace parameters, much like how raids function in cooperative-play arenas. Player achievement within tournament events is rewarded with genre-specific gear and customization items. These rewards serve as measurements of player ethos in the PvP sub-community. Tournaments are typically timed events, meaning that they are only available to access periodically and for short blocks of time. This adds to the exclusivity of the tournament gamespace, and also

(Fig. 6: Playercards for 3 members of the clan community Vexed Minds, all of which display the clan name and insignia. Clan names often situate identity; Vex is the name Destiny gives a race of computer-controlled enemies that quest for universal domination)

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enhances the perceived value of the rewards it offers participants. Multiplayer PvP tournament events can be analogously compared to the end-season tournaments commonplace in professional sports; securing top rankings is the culmination of prolonged exposure to the multiplayer gamespace, and those who emerge victorious instantaneously assume roles of ethos until they are once again challenged to defend it in subsequent tournaments. Destiny refers to its episodic tournament as the Iron Banner. Through competing in the Iron Banner, players earn specialized currency and reputation that they can exchange for gear and customization options. Users can only access the game-controlled vendor that approves these transactions while the tournament event is active. While most of Destinys traditional PvP mechanics remain unchanged, the Iron Banner does pose one heavily significant alteration to the normative. Whereas traditional multiplayer game variants balance player and equipment levels to ensure universally non-partial interactions, the Iron Banner imposes no such regulations; players of higher levels who possess more advanced equipment are able to capitalize on the bonuses therein provided, which places them in a position of advantage. In other words, Destiny effectively ensures that only players it deems as being of worth are able to actively participate in high-stakes events like the Iron Banner. Users that have established identities of authority within the gamespace have the ability to further construct and shape meaning, while those of lesser ethos have their access to such formation controlled. I first attempted the Iron Banner while playing as a level 14 character. At the time, the gear with which my character was outfitted allowed me to perform qualitatively in the traditional multiplayer gamespace. To elaborate, player performance in the types of PvP scenarios found in first-person shooter gamespaces is evaluated using a particular measuring apparatus known as a kill-death ratio (KDR). This ratio presents a numerical assessment of player skill through analyzing the number of times a user was defeated and how many other players they defeated. In other words, if a user obtained four kills within the gamespace while only dying twice, that players KDR would be a 2.0. The higher a players KDR is, the higher their perceived authority over others within that space.

My KDR averaged between 2.2-2.9 after playing with my level 14 character in five traditional multiplayer matches. I then proceeded to play five matches of the Iron Banner tournament. Upon completion of the fifth match, I averaged my comprehensive KDR as being 1.3. It can be reasonably argued that such an observable decrease in player ability was caused by a migration into a high-ethos gamespace. To further explore this possibility, I replayed the same five Iron Banner scenarios against the differing participants, this time using a level 30 character of the same class. I observed two noteworthy differences that resulted from my introduction of a high-ethos character into the equation. Firstly, My KDR average after the culmination of the last match was a 3.0. This is a 1.7 increase from the average obtained through engagement with my level 14 character. Secondly, Users assigned to my team were more openly willing to communicate ideas with me and consider my strategic suggestions. When engaging with the space as a level 14 character, all attempts at team communication were either ignored or otherwise dismissed.

Griffin 9 I argue that the latter of these two observances is more telling of how ethos, identity, and meaning exist interdependently within the Destiny gamespace. It can be said that, in any given scenario, having the proper tools for the task at hand will increase the likelihood of successful outcomes; a shovel is inarguably a better tool for digging a ditch than is a spoon. In context, my chances of performing more qualitatively in the Iron Banner will obviously be impacted by my choosing to engage with that space using a better-equipped character. However, I was not expecting the degrees of player-to-player communication to vary so drastically. While playing as my level 14 character, I attempted several times to verbally connect with the users assigned to my team. I started by asking other users where they intended to set up defensive positions, using universally understood map landmarks as references. I received no response. I routinely attempted to check in with other users, documenting my current locations and reporting observations of enemy players. At times, other users would respond cooperatively. However, many users expressed discontent with my repeated attempts at communication, spouting utterances like no one cares and other offensive remarks. When I re-entered the Iron Banner using my level 30 character, I employed the same communicative tactics. Other users seemed more reactive to my inquiries, providing their locations and detailing strategic plans. After situating myself in a high-ethos identity, I did not receive any objections to my assertion of authority within the gamespace. When compared with my experiences assuming a low-ethos identity, this showcases how Destiny Literacies work to manipulate player interactions within the gamespace; because I was perceived to be gamespace literate, other users exhibited limited reserve in following my instructive leads. While the argument could certainly be made that my second-round observations were the result of a more embracive group of external participants, I feel as though the extent of the dissonance that exists between my two sets of observations attests to the existence of something more. I firmly believe that the lack of challenge I encountered was stimulated the re-positioning of my identity within the contextual community.

Conclusion

This essay concludes, through comprehensively examining both the singleplayer cooperative-play and multiplayer competitive-play gamespaces afforded by Destiny, that:

meaning and user identity within these realms are socially constructed community-centric entities

player interactions within the gamespace are heavily dictated by perceived user ethos, which is determined and assessed through specialized parameters established by and unique to the gamespace they encompass

It is my hope that, as the author of this essay, the content disclosed herein persuades cultural and community scholars to more readily engage with emergent digitized

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communities as they evolve their understandings as to how these entities influence the rhetoric at work within them. It is the view of the author that academia displays a certain level of resistance when considering the educational merit of seemingly leisurely genres of exposition. In reality, these spaces offer new insightful perspectives on the impact that external forces hold over rhetoric, and present notions that are supported by accepted theoretical reasoning. If the academy continues to deny acceptance to these embryonic community spaces, then it will limit scholarly interaction with what could very well be the future of our fields rhetorical understandings.

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