Conclusions

What can we conclude from this incredible variety of talk forms and creative game actions? The complexity of the talk and action mirrors the social complexity of many online game types from MUDDS to FPS shooter games. This diversity of game talk reveals a complex social world that participants enter willfully. It is a world of rules and social conventions that often appear invisible to outsiders and may well remain invisible to new insiders until conflicts arise between players. Through the playing of the game and negotiating conflicts one learns the meaning of the game, the meaning of "having fun." And that "having fun," is bound up with creative actions taken to enhance the pleasure of the game.

The meaning of playing Counter-Strike is not merely embodied in the graphics or even the violent game play, but in the social mediations that go on between players through their talk with each other and by their performance within the game. Participants, then, actively create the meaning of the game through their virtual talk and behavior borrowing heavily from popular and youth culture representations. Players learn rules of social comportment that reproduce codes of behavior and established standards of conduct, while also safely experimenting with the violation of these codes. This "learning," which comes through a creative restructuring of "social heritage" appropriated from the world outside the game, is evidence of the profound "ambiguity of play" (Sutton-Smith 1997).

Finally, Counter-Strike players resemble a youth subculture (Hebdige 1979, 1988; Thornton 1996) that can enter "liminoid" or liminal-like genre that promotes a temporary "limbo" of statuslessness, flow and movement (Turner 1982), a refashioning of time and community (Bruckman 1996; Bryce and Rutter 2000). This creative re-shaping of everyday life through play is an example of what Brian Sutton-Smith describes when he speaks of play and games as "anti-structural" occasions for "experimentation with variable repertoires" and "making free with a given social heritage." Sutton-Smith notes that "we may be disorderly in games either because we have an overdose of order, and want to let off steam, or because we have something to learn through being disorderly (1972)."

The acceptance of both disorder and creative player actions within a bounded universe like Counter-Strike offers the game player a context in which to exercise safe ritual license with behaviors that would not be tolerated in the "real" world of everyday life (for example, "trash" talking). Liminoid cultural forms like Counter-Strike stand "betwixt and between" the external and less temporary structural and normative social constraints which apply outside both rituals and games. Even though game players may work hard to reproduce conventions of social behavior in their chats they also offer an opportunity to explore new creative uses of such games, beyond the intention of the game designer.

We hope that our brief exploration into creative player actions will assist in keeping the debate concerning the social forces that make such game playing attractive open by pointing beyond the standard explanations of the media effects literature (Barker and Patley 1997; Griffiths 1996; Gillmore and Crissman 1997) and militarism (Toles 1985; Gibson 1994). Ultimately, the player's perspective (Jenkins 1999) and understanding of play must be included in any meaningful discussion of FPS games and, indeed, of all video games.