There Ain’t No Shame In A Community Game

‘Gaming community’ is a term that I hadn’t really given much consideration to before I became a Ready Up Staff Writer. I don’t think the term takes on much meaning before you start playing online games. Gaming used to be a very solitary activity for me; sitting alone in the dark with the curtains drawn, playing Silent Hill, Resident Evil, BioShock, or Tomb Raider – that’s what ‘gaming’ was for me. That is, until recently, with the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Drawn in by an undeniable mixture of excitement, curiosity and sheer determination, I stepped out of the dark and into the world of online first-person shooters.

I touched upon how playing online games with friends has helped me through difficult times in my last blog. However, my point here is that that’s not all it’s done. At a more fundamental level it’s helped me to simply enjoy myself again. It’s taken over my lone game-time; my single-player adventure game sessions. Well, that together with the embarrassing shortfall of high-quality titles in recent years.

Ready Up hosts gaming nights on Mondays and Thursdays where staff and forumers play a new and popular game together. This has included Grand Theft Auto IV, which gave rise to Tony impressively using player avatars as human skittles, and more recently Call of Duty: Black Ops, which gave rise to me not so impressively repeatedly embarrassing myself on the end-game scoreboard.

With my second Ready Up meet only two months away I’m getting increasingly excited about meeting these great people again whom I share much in common with. Community gaming alone shows you how far the videogame industry has come since the ‘70s and ‘80s – the era of the elite bedroom coder.