Chapter 11: Online Gaming: Building Bridges that Enhance Cultural Understandings

In our current state of global affairs, multiple conflicts simultaneously confront our world. Cultural and political wars, environmental issues, and military conflicts often polarize populations, undercutting ways to learn and understand from one another. Online gaming provides a unique opportunity for diverse individuals from all over the world to interact virtually with one another in real time. This interactive, immersive medium potentially offers ways that individuals who have different culture, ethnicity, race, gender, socioeconomic status, and educational level can collaborate, cooperate, and compete within a structured framework designed by a gaming community.

Our research explores the psychosocial implications of online gaming in terms of building (or undercutting) cultural understandings. We are attempting to delineate ways in which designers of and participants in online games can help diverse individuals to develop and work towards common goals. We are also studying how the processes of online gaming can contribute to forming meaningful friendships based on the appreciation of differing cultural experiences among individuals separated by geography and worldview.