What Are Gaming Communities?
By: Patrick WendoDate: 2020-06-10
“I don’t need a weapon, my friends are my power” - Sora, Kingdom Hearts
Tacky as that sounds, it’s pretty accurate. Communities are what make or break society, and gaming communities come in multiple genres and sizes. They started back in the day when everyone was flocking to play Pac-Man at arcades. Later when the internet became widespread, the communities moved online, letting more people join in on the fun. Games like World of Warcraft garnered a massive online demographic as one of the most popular MMO-RPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) of its time.
Joining these communities is not as hard as you would imagine. For starters, the simplest communities to join are the ones split along platform lines. Naturally, you would end up with the PlayStation Community, the XBOX Community, the Nintendo Community, and the PC community (generally referred to as the PC Master Race, PCMR). These communities are popular on platforms like Reddit having their own dedicated subreddits. The benefit of joining one such community is the prevalence of support you will get be it looking for a game, a device repair, gaming partners, or a pro-tip on how to solve a problem you may have with your platform. They are also on Facebook, discord, and factions like PCMR have a twitter and Instagram page.
XBOX V PS V NINTENDO
If that seems too general, you could join video game communities about a specific game. For instance, Fortnite on Reddit has 441,000 members and Grand Theft Auto (GTA) online has 628,000 members. This has the benefit of finding game match-ups easily if you’re playing online. It also lets you share game content you have captured to a captive audience. This could be in the context of showcasing new skins, some breathtaking views you caught mid-game, or in the case of fighting games, epic combos you performed. Almost every popular game has a page on Facebook, a subreddit dedicated to it, and a couple of streamers on twitch and some discord channels associated with it.
This may all be online and you want a more local and personal community where you know people in the community. In that case, you would want to check out the local gaming scene like Pro Series Gaming (psg.co.ke), MastersOfMayhem ( https://www.instagram.com/mom_254/ ), tekken254 ( https://www.instagram.com/tekken254/ ), simbaultimate ( https://www.instagram.com/simbaultimate/ ) and a couple of others. The benefit of local communities is that you will always be a couple of uber rides away from a tournament or a meetup, and you share a language which will be a definite step up if you spend a lot of time on CS: GO forums (they speak a lot of Russian there).
PSG LAN Party: Masters of Mayhem
The local scene such as Pros Series Gaming is definitely the best place to start if you want to join a community, or a clan or a team. However, who is to say you cannot start your own gaming clan?