Mona elaborated on how difficult it can be for young women to discover their own interest in things that are stereotypically male:
There’s always that issue of access. You don’t have girls saying, “Oh, video games, I should play them because they’re cool.” What I mean by that is that a lot of girls, when they’re brought up, they basically do things that their peers are interested in or that their parents give them access to. Because no one tells me that, I’m not going to say, “Hi mom, get me an N64.” That’s what my brother did because he was like, “Oh, all my guy friends are getting N64s. Mom, get me an N64.” Otherwise, girls are only exposed to things like shopping. Your peers are really interested in shopping. Your peers are really interested in books and “hanging out.” It’s very different, and because of the different exposure that you are given, I feel like it’s more difficult to learn how to read a game or learn how to play a game.
Mona suggests that young women ask for things that their peers and parents think are culturally appropriate. If her brother had not asked for video games, she would probably not have had the opportunity to play them.
Having access to video games at home is not the only influencing factor in Mona’s development of a geeky interest. She also met like-minded geeky peers in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at her high school. IB programs expose students to mathematics, science, and critical thinking, which may explain why Mona found many other geeky kids to hang out with. “A lot of us were nerds,” she said. There, she met three other female friends with similar backgrounds—they had geeky siblings and were interested in StarCraft. They became best friends. Playing competitively online for the first time is a nerve-racking experience for all StarCraft players. Mona and her friends supported each other, socially and emotionally, by cheering each other on until they became more confident. At school, they beat the StarCraft boys in their class.
Mona speculated that had she not had geeky siblings and peers in her early life, she would have found it difficult to pick up video gaming in college. She provided us with an example by describing expert keyboard manipulation. “What is WASD? You move using those controls in a game. If you only use your computer to check your email, it’s incredibly difficult for females to get into the gaming scene.” Mona told us that many college women she had met faced similar difficulties. Gaming skills are more complex than simply controlling your mouse to click on icons. Avid gamers develop fine keyboarding skills, such as clicking on the correct keys without even looking at the keyboard, through their frequent usages of common game controls such as WASD. These gamers can pick up new games and become good at them much more easily than others can.
At Princeton University, Mona remained deeply interested in StarCraft and looked for like-minded students to form a StarCraft II club. She describes how she first recruited participants, joking that a shared geeky Asian identity helped prime the pump. “If I saw an Asian guy who kind of looked Korean, who looked like he might know what StarCraft was, I would ask and be like, ‘Hey, we should start a StarCraft team.’ And so I met a lot of people through that process.”
After she found a handful of students at Princeton who were interested in StarCraft II, the group began organizing matches with other schools:
We were thinking, “Hey, in two years, if we get 20 schools we will be happy.” What happened was, the Princeton students—I started trying to meet the Princeton team—and someone from MIT who was my friend, he said, “Hey, we play StarCraft here, let’s have a show match.” We thought it was great fun so we made a hype video about it and we broadcast it.
After that, people started emailing us. We did most of this through Team Liquid [a popular StarCraft community site]. People were like, “Hey, we want to play too.” At first, we were just going to do show matches every week, and I would try to organize them. But eventually we got so many sign-ups that we got 26 people.… Then we went up to 144, and now we’re at 250.
Through a collaborative effort between Mona and her friends, Collegiate Starleague has become an overwhelming success, built on the principles of peer support and shared interests. These college students use their social networks of similar-aged peers to build a league in which players share an interest in StarCraft II competition and learning and are identified by the college they are attending. In 2013, participating colleges included the champion University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; and University of Washington.
2
Affinity
Bonding through Shared Cultures and Practices
Lead Authors: Rachel Cody Pfister and Crystle Martin
Introduction
Maria, a 17-year-old Asian college student from the Philippines, was interviewed as part of Martin’s study of online fans of professional wrestling (see the end of chapter 1 for the Wrestling Boards case study).1 She was first introduced to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) when her father brought home some wrestling trading cards, and she started to watch WWE when she was a freshman in high school. Her brother would watch with her, but her friends at school teased her and called her a tomboy when she shared her interest in WWE. The online world became a haven for her to connect with peers who shared her interest, and she became an active participant in discussion forums for the WWE fandom. She is particularly active on a role-playing board on the Wrestling Boards, where fans write collaborative fanfiction together, creating and taking on the roles of different wrestlers. Through her participation in the Wrestling Boards, Maria developed both an interest and skill in writing.
Online affinity networks such as the Wrestling Boards are collectives that have shared interests, practices, and marked roles in the community that define levels of responsibility and expertise. These groups are not necessarily limited, however, to the tight ties that one might associate with a “community,” though all of them do include participants who have these kinds of personal relationships. Because of their reliance on open peer-to-peer networks, online affinity networks can include large numbers of lurkers, observers, and transient participants, whether they are sporadic readers or readers with casual interests who might browse a forum after a Google search. Indeed, these more casual participants make up the majority of an affinity network (Gee 2017). Even while allowing for lurkers and casual audience members, these online affinity networks are sustained through interpersonal relationships, shared activities, and a sense of cultural affinity. These characteristics distinguish online affinity networks from more traditional media audiences or from a diffuse interest or scene. For example, the StarCraft gaming scene is very broad and diffuse, and it includes a constellation of online affinity networks centered on activities such as game modding, or competitive league-based play where some people develop close working relationships with one another. Conversely, an online affinity network is broader than what one might associate with a specific activity or program, such as a summer StarCraft program, or a single gaming event, at which participants might gather for a specific period but then disband without forming sustaining practices and relationships.
We describe the groups we have studied as “online affinity networks” to distinguish them from long-standing affinity groups and networks that have predated the online world. We call them “online” affinity networks as a shorthand to distinguish them from affinity networks that are primarily grounded in place-based activities and organizations, and we are not implying that they are not “real,” tied to face-to-face interactions, or embedded in physical infrastructures. This chapter delves into the infrastructure, culture, and practices that hold online affinity networks together.
Infrastructure and Space
Ever since its early days, the internet has been an avenue for people to connect with others with shared interests and