Gaming Cultures (week Sixteen)

Since the dawn of games there has been some sort of gaming culture, since my discovery of online games when I was at school I was part of the Counter-Strike gaming culture. It was a very social culture depending on how involved you became. You could of been involved in the whole clan culture or not. Since my Counter-Strike days Ive been involved in many gaming cultures such as a Battlefield 2 tournament, I was heavily involved with this tournament and I enjoyed my days playing Battlefield 2 with friends I made online.
However two years ago I became involved with Eve-Online, now MMO cultures I find are very different and vast compared to, say the CS community culture. Using Eve-Online as an example of a vast culture. However you could argue that there are sub-cultures within Eves main culture, such as people from different countries integrating some of their own real life cultures into the game itself. Within Eve-Online the Galaxy's are split into Empire (npc controlled) and 0.0 or lawless space (controlled by real people). The lawless space is controlled by different alliances and all alliances are controlled again by real life people. Different alliances have different cultures and social structures. All alliances are made up by smaller groups of people, these are called Corporations (clans). These "corps" can have 10 to 500 people within them, generally they join alliances that have the same ideas, structure and culture as themselves.
I know of one corp within Eve that use Communism to run their corp and it works in a virtual environment which again is experimenting in a real time environment with different real life cultures and ideas.
Some online cultures can have alot of power and influence certain real life aspects, for an example the recent launch of the chocolate bar called Whisper. It was relaunched due to a group on Facebook that became very large in numbers of people asking the manufacturer to bring back the chocolate bar.
The biggest difference between real life cultures and Internet/online cultures is that the person doesn't have to be physically part of that culture, they can share views via the Internet and other media and everyday the Internet is getting bigger and bigger. Therefore Internet cultures and should not be underestimated.