12 Communication and Interaction in Multiplayer First-Person-Shooter Games

Since their emergence in the 1960s, computer games have developed into a central part of popular culture. An ever-increasing number of players plays games using their computers. One of the most successful forms of computer games is the phenomenon of multiplayer games, i.e. computer games that more than one player can participate in. In these games, various interaction and communication processes take place between the players as well as between the players and the virtual game spaces that these games provide. This chapter attempts to describe multiplayer games as a form of computer-mediated communication (CMC). This mode of communication has often been described as lacking certain social cues that a face-to-face situation provides. However, to understand communication and interaction processes, one needs to understand the situation in which these processes take place. The situation in which multiplayer games take place makes a large amount of cooperation and task-oriented interaction between the players necessary. This chapter attempts to examine communication processes in multiplayer first-person-shooter (FPS) games as determined by the gaming situation in as well as the social context of these games, emphasizing that communication in these games is successful despite the constraints it has in common with other forms of CMC.