Understanding Virtual Communities in Online Games

Along with rapid innovations in IT technology for the last few decades, the world of online games has emerged as one of the most exemplary and fast-growing forms of the Internet economy. Broadly, the term online game covers a variety of Internet-based computer games in which network users log on to host computers through the Internet and play with other users on a real-time basis. However, strictly speaking, there are at least three different subcategories within the online game: “network game” such as Blizzard’s Starcraft, “Internet game” such as MSN’s MSN Games, and “online game” in a narrow sense such as EA’s Ultima Online. Such differences include the number of gaming participants and the range of interactions allowed by a given game system, graphical richness, and the relative openness of a game’s spatiotemporal environment.