Digital forms

Using digital forms

Interacting within the community is heavily based on digital platforms. Affordances are present within these platforms, and ‘shape the ways people make sense of a technology’ (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym 2015, p. 3) by allowing members to use the platform to connect with others about the game, and in return create a ‘relationship between material structure and practice’ (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym 2015, p. 11).

On Facebook, affordances such as liking and reacting to posts, sharing images, replying to comments, and tagging other members in posts are used consistently within this community. Twitter employs similar ‘interface-features level’ (McVeigh-Scultz & Baym 2015, p. 6) affordances which are used by the community often. Liking and reacting to posts is not an affordance on platforms such as Reddit and Discord; instead, users create threads, comment on threads, and upvote or downvote these threads and comments.

These affordances allow and disallow different forms of engagement within the community and shape cultures of etiquette pertaining to each platform. Facebook and Twitter users within this community tended to post photos more often than Discord or Reddit users, perhaps due to the ‘interface-systems level’ (McVeigh-Schultz & Baym 2015, p. 6) affordances, which are ‘broad organisational structures’ (p. 6), of these platforms. The architecture of subreddits is shaped in a way which affords text-based content; photo and video tend to disrupt the flow of these threads. This limitation cultivates a specific culture of discussion, whereby Reddit is a platform on which hard or factual forms of interaction are most often expressed. Conversely, visual media on Facebook and Twitter fosters soft or emotive forms of interaction, where members share visual memes.