In the last twenty years or so, videogames have evolved from single player, pixely PC games like The Oregon Trail to massive multiplayer online first person shooters like the Halo series of games, ending with the latest edition Halo: Reach. This revolution of gaming has created a new reality online that is not only contending for a label of e-lore but as performance folklore. Halo: Reach, for example, has performance markers such as a shift in language that involves using words or phrases that would have no meaning outside of this gaming reality or this virtual world. Halo: Reach also supports a traditional reward-system—a.k.a. someone does a good job and then as a result, receives a reward. This reward-system illustrates traditional values like “there are consequences for your actions” and “practice makes perfect.” Gamers take on the role of a Spartan in the virtual UNSC, or the future army of planet Earth. This is a role in a performance. And the performance is online gaming: impressing others with gaming skills.
            Halo: Reach is set on the planet Reach, an earth-like planet that is being invaded and colonized by an alien race known as the Covenant. Already, this sounds as if it is a sci-fi movie or a theatrical production.  But instead of watching the plot unfold, the audience—or gamer—actively participates in its unraveling. During the game, the gamer is guided through the life of a Spartan: a futuristic soldier with advanced armor capabilities, state of the art weaponry, and a powerful appearance that would have any teenage boy saying “Oh my god, I want to be that.” This particular Spartan is known only as Noble 6, or the sixth member of an elite team of Spartan soldiers with a mission to take back the planet Reach from Covenant control. This would be the campaign game mode of Halo: Reach that has more of a plot line. So this game type is demonstrating a different kind of performance, which is more personal in that this game mode is usually played by only one or two players who are friends and do not judge each other on skill but accept their fellow gamer and friend for who they are as a person. But when switching to the multiplayer matchmaking world of Halo: Reach, the only thing that matters is mindless killing and lots of it.
            Multiplayer matchmaking is a game mode that allows a gamer to interact with several different gamers from all over the world. A popular multiplayer game mode is Team Slayer, where a team of four Spartans team up to play four other Spartans in a battle to get as many kills as possible. Each Team Slayer game has the same objective: the first team to accumulate fifty kills wins. This puts a lot of pressure on every player to pull his/her own weight. Players can plug in microphones to their Xbox 360 controllers to interact with other gamers that have chosen to exploit this communication feature. This also forces other gamers to perform better or get more kills. Many people who plug in microphones usually demean the other team to create a sense of unity with their own teammates. This sort of braggart communication serves an esoteric function. By boasting and insulting the enemy team, players are brought together by a sense of superiority, creating a temporary folk performance group. Many players promise to beat the other team before the game starts—while all eight players are waiting in the lobby while the game loads—and this promise puts pressure on each team to overcome each other. The sense of competition is fierce in most cases, trash-talking is creating a definite mood of emotional tension that causes each team to try harder or perform better.
            Not only do other players put the pressure on teammates to perform more skillfully, but different systems of rewards cause players to try harder in every single game mode of Halo: Reach. The developers of Halo: Reach included a system of ranks based off of actual army ranks. When first beginning to play, a gamer is a mere Private in the UNSC Spartan army. To get a higher rank, players must get more kills faster, thus earning credits or virtual points that add up in a sort of loading bar that, once filled up with the appropriate amount of credits, advances the player to the next rank. Another system of rewards accompanying this credit system is the armor-unlock system. For every rank, there are different pieces of armor that can be unlocked to make the player’s personal Spartan look “cooler” and more individual. Other players often judge the worth of their teammates based on the armor they have unlocked and purchased with their credits and also the rank they have achieved.
            A minor reward system would be the medals-system. For every feat a player accomplishes in Halo: Reach there is a medal awarded that shows up in the post game statistics table. The medals one receives can often affect the credit-system in a positive way, causing them to increase with the accumulation of medals. Medals are awarded based on the quickness one uses to kill enemies, the amount of enemies killed without dying, and the technique used to kill enemies. There are quickness of kills medals such as Double Kills, which are the most common. Double Kills occur when a player kills one enemy and then another enemy within four seconds of the first kill. There is an entire sequence of these multi-kill medals starting with Double Kill, then Triple Kill, Overkill, Killtacular, Killtrocity, Killamanjaro, Killtastrophe, Killpocalypse, Killionaire, and Skullamanjaro. Every player is judged by the medals rewarded at the end of the game. I have just named a few, but there are 112 possible medals that can be awarded to any gamer in any game type.
            These medals display a very important textural quality of performance folklore, and that quality is language. There is a definite shift from normal language that is involved in playing Halo: Reach. For example, general gaming lingo—words that are used most often during any given game mode of Halo: Reach. Besides the creative name for all the medals there are also names for the armor, armor abilities, weapons, maps, game types, service tags, gamer tags, emblems, and strategies. Some words that are generally said and heard are “Sniped”, “Sworded”, “Loved”, “Stuck”, “Fancy Assassinated”, “Instant Killed”, and there are several more, all of which refer to a different way of being killed. A few words that are not so obviously techniques of being killed and are exclusive to Halo: Reach would be “Loved,” where a player is killed with an alien weapon called a Needler, and “Stuck,” when someone has been blown up by a plasma grenade. More language includes unacceptable customs like “He’s lagging,” which means the player does not have a good internet connection and is slowing the game down. And “they are camping” which means that a player or players are sitting in an enclosed area of the map with a powerful weapon like a shotgun or plasma sword. A custom associated with Halo: Reach is “T-bagging,” which involves crouching on an enemy multiple times after killing him. It is supposed to mean that the player who survived the fight is putting his genitalia on his enemy. Many players believe that this act is offensive and get quite angry when people do it. But this action does provide an esoteric function. This establishes that the person T-bagging is male and he is performing a sort of alpha male action and displaying his dominance over the enemy he has just killed.
            This gaming reality is like any other society or culture in the world. One has to be a member of the group to understand the customs, cultural norms, and language. This group of Halo: Reach gamers is definitely a folk group that utilizes folklore performance as a way of showing individual skills and accomplishments to be respected as an experienced gamer. I can attest that this virtual reality is extremely addicting in that there is a great sense of personal achievement when a player reaches a certain rank or purchases a certain piece of “cool” armor. This folk group very much relies on what the other members of the group think of each other and if they approve of a single player’s performance. I am currently a General in the UNSC, I have a Gungir helmet, a Parafoil chest with adjoining robotic arm, a Tactical/tacpad wrist, black visor tint, UA/NxRA utility, MJOLNIR variant Security shoulders, and I’ve beaten the campaign on Legendary. When I log on and play Halo: Reach, that is who I am. For that brief amount of time, I can escape from reality and be a Spartan, and I can struggle to perform well and feel extremely accomplished, when I do perform well and get noticed for it.