Communities Formed by Communication

Communities Formed by Communication

Communications is a fundamental key in everyday life, and are essentials that drive everyday life. Communication is what organises reality and is the most important part of human interactions and shapes the way everybody interacts (Kuttainen, 2017). Being able to use communicative skills in a polite and respective manner is what powers the everyday users of the internet. Without the skills to be able to communicate, internet sites such as Imagine Games Network (IGN) would be useless. The IGN forums are the ideal focus for communication as everybody is needing to talk to each other through text to fully express emotions and ideologies.

The online forum known as IGN uses this basic form of communication to connect people around the world to discuss matters in the gaming world. The ideas from the book The Songlines can be related to the IGN website when conversing on the ideologies of games that have stories and meaning, how knowing the game may have no meaning until the ‘songlines’ are ‘sung’ to make meaning of the that game (Chatwin, 1987).  The IGN forum is a special place that ties all the gaming community together to pull apart stories and discuss the feelings they experienced while they were traversing the game.

The Conversation.com explores the ideas and traits of game writers and highlights that to completely submerse your audience in a game the story must be exceptional. This is where IGN comes into play, a place where games can all express the heartfelt emotion of the games and collaborate with one another to obtain a deeper understanding of the stories expressed by game writers. The IGN website is a place where people from all languages can connect, both the written and spoken parts of language are in use.

The two core skills of language; the written and the spoken both play a key role in the way forums work. Written language on the IGN website is the most commonly used and although there are different types of colloquial terms throughout every language the gaming community has developed its own colloquial terms. Colloquial terms developed by the gaming community are most commonly used and can be hard to understand if general knowledge of video games is not known. Spoken language is not very common among the users, although the employees of IGN tend to post videos to interact with the vast community. Although this is great way of communicating with the community, it can also be a pivotal downfall as the main language is English. Although this is a minor downfall IGN have been able to setup multiple websites for all different languages combatting this issue. While this may be disempowering to some the IGN team has combatted this issue well.

Figure 1. The Basement (https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-art-of-video-game-writing-60376)

References

Chatwin, B. (1987). The Songlines. London, UK: Robert Hartnoll Ltd

Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture 5: Power. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

The Conversation. (2016). The Basement [Image]. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-art-of-video-game-writing-60376

The Conversation. (2016). Explaining the art of video game writing. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-art-of-video-game-writing-60376