Teamwork has always been one of the most important aspects of gameplay. The line between a group of people playing a professional sport, or trying to complete an intense raid in World of Warcraft is relatively fine. As someone who has played many sports, but has never played in a massively multiplayer game online, I don’t have much to work with in terms of comparing my own experience. What I can do is talk about my experience playing on multiple sports teams, and then attempt to draw a comparison between that and what I see in others who play multiplayer video games.
When I was in middle school, I was the only girl on the 7th grade football team. I loved football as a child, and the fact that society told me it was a male sport, and that it would be weird for a girl to play on a full contact football team with a bunch of boys didn’t phase me. My initial worry about taking on the challenge of playing in a sport which it was atypical for a girl to play on, was that I would get teased, which I did. I was teased all the time by other girls in school. Although I was teased by all the girls, I rarely got teased by any boys, especially the ones who were on the team with me. I was a part of the team, and as a part of the team was not looked at as, “that one weird girl who for some reason decided to play football”, but was just another player who had the same responsibility as the rest of the team to cooperate and work together.
When I was in High School I was on multiple sports teams as well. I was on the Golf Team, Basketball Team, and did track and field for a year. Every team I was ever on was all about cooperation and working together, players were not left out and always worked together to improve the team as a whole. When you are on a sports team, the success of the entire group is dependent on working together completely as a team. If you don’t work together to improve as a team, then there is no way the team will be successful.
While I have never played any multi-player video games online, I can see how the same sense of teamwork and cooperation immerse themselves into the culture. Whether providing a medical kit for a teammate in Left for Dead, or having healers in WOW during a raid, the success of a team in video games are likely just as dependent as those in the sports world on player cooperation.
Because video games are able to foster teamwork on such a large scale, I think it makes them an even more powerful source for providing people with the cooperative and team-building social skills that parents push their kids into sports for as children. I remember being pushed into soccer as a little kid, because my mom wanted me to make friends and learn how to become “socially skilled” –whatever that means. I was not a very social child, and playing soccer or being in sports did not actually turn me into the social butterfly that everyone hoped for, however, they did teach me how to be a cooperative person, and good at working together with other people, so for that I am thankful.
Whether one chooses to play multi-player video games, sports, or both, I think both are a great way to encourage team building and cooperation.