The ritual:

Gamefaqs is a very popular gaming website and forum that people use as a communal portal for gamers. On this website, there is a sub-forum for essentially every game out on the market today. Each of these sub-forums has its own community with its own culture and cyber-rituals. My informant frequently posts on and reads the sub-forums dedicated to fighting games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and BlazBlue. While all of these sub-forums reference different games, they are very similar games and as such these sub-forums contain similar communities. Because so many people post on these forums, it can be hard to establish a unique identity for yourself even if you are a frequent visitor and poster. However, there are two ways a poster (someone who posts on the online forums) can distinguish themselves from the pact: their avatar (a picture next to their profile) and their signature (a blurb of text shown after everything they post).

Gamefaqs users in particular place a lot of value on the signature. Users will often use their signature to show to the community who they are. As such, the creation of and transformation of a user’s signature is highly ritualized in the Gamefaqs fighting game sub-community. In these communities, the most respected and revered users have a picture of their favorite or best character from the game they play the most in their signature. For example, if someone played a lot of Blanca (a playable character) in the game Street Fighter he would put a picture of Blanca in his signature. The picture is often accompanied by a line of text saying something along the lines of “Gamefaq’s official (insert character here).”

While this seems like a fairly simple and non-confrontational thing to do, my informant, a Gamefaqs user of many years, revealed to me that members of this community take these signatures very seriously. Once someone has a character in their signature, nobody else is allowed to use that character in their signature. My informant told me that “if someone tries to put a character that has already been taken in their signature, they will be ignored or harassed until they change their signature to something else.” He continued to say that, “sometimes, when a user is completely unwilling to change their signature a moderator of the site will ban them from the forums temporary or forcefully change it.  This is something we take very seriously. Your signature is almost your entire identity on [Gamefaqs] so when someone challenges that of course the community is going to fight back.” However, if someone feels like they should be the true “owner” of a certain character’s signature, they may challenge the current “owner” to a best of three (sometimes best of five) match up to claim the title for themselves. Whoever wins gets to keep the signature.

Analysis:

Clearly identity is very important to the members of this community. Because it is one of the few ways to separate yourself, it makes sense that a user’s signature would be very important to him. The interesting thing here is how the entire community seems to respond when someone challenges the identity of a single user. This reveals that there is some form of a herd mentality in this community; if you mess with one member you mess with everyone. I believe this may be based on a fear of their system being challenged. If one person’s signature is taken freely, then anyones suddenly becomes up for grabs. In a community where anyone can join at any point by registering online, the old members can only secure their identity by helping each other keep the status quo.