Is Steam a Community or a Lifestyle Enclave? RLST 245

According to Bellah in his book Habits of the Heart, there are two distinct types of social groups at the societal level. The first is a community, which is defined as a group of people who are interdependent, participate in discussion and decision making, and share practices that define and nurture their community. It also has a sense of history, and remembers that history. The second type is a lifestyle enclave, which he defines as a group of people who share a similar private life, who express their identity through shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities. These groups are distinct from each other, but Bellah also states that if a lifestyle enclave begins to show interdependence, politics, or begins to share a history, it becomes a community.

It’s doubtful that Bellah saw the internet coming, but I would like to examine these concepts in the context of a huge social networking site for gamers called Steam. http://store.steampowered.com/

 

While Steam began as a digital distribution site, it has grown far beyond its original purpose. Not only can users communicate via instant messaging from in-game, but the site itself has expanded in so many ways that it begs to be classified as a lifestyle enclave or a community.

So what would Bellah say about Steam? First, it’s notable that while social networks like Facebook appeal to just about any sort of person, there’s really no reason for a person who does not license game software from Steam to have an account, so it’s pretty exclusively geared towards gamers. The fact that this site caters exclusively a particular category of people fits pretty solidly into a lifestyle enclave. Second, since users choose to create an account, participation in Steam is a lifestyle choice, making it even more an enclave. Finally, while social networking is a strong aspect of Steam, it’s still chiefly a distribution platform, so the focus is always on the games. This means that even while users socialize, they often from groups based on their patronage of specific games, further focusing people into smaller interest groups.

It’s pretty clear that Steam is for gamers. And it’s pretty easy to see that gamers have similar interests and lifestyles, and that sounds a lot like a lifestyle enclave. But what happens when you click on the website’s tab labeled “Community”?

Within “Community” we see a number of enigmatic subtabs labeled “Discussions”, “Workshop”, “Greenlight”, and “Market”. Discussions turn out to be a public forum not unlike most online forums. Here you find people engaging in sometimes productive and sometimes heated discussions about how the gaming industry should be run, the quality of various games and their developers, and even controversial new features to Steam itself. Here we find people trying to table ideas or rally support for ways they think the gaming community as a whole should work. According to Bellah, that’s a community. Under the Greenlight tab, we see that Steam, instead of determining which games get published in a closed board-meeting, are enlisting community to vote on which game developers should get the chance to distribute their game on Steam. People are collectively participating in decisions that will influence the community and industry at large. 

 

In Workshop we find content created by talented amateur modders which users can effortlessly install to customize their gaming experience, and in the Market we find users trading licenses and items that can be used inside various games. In these ways, users are dependent on each other to supply value and content. And that dependency is about as close to a community as Bellah could hope for. But what about a sense of history, does Steam have that? I would argue yes, because while it also gives us news about the gaming industry, and tells us what games our friends have been playing, it is also composed of many people who remember when it was just a way to download games off the internet, and have seen how far it’s come towards bringing gamers together into a real community.