XBox Live etiquette

My neighbor Ed’s loves Halo3, which is a “first person shooter” game in an alien world. He virtually interacts with hundreds of players through a mediated space online and can talk to them via headphones; strangers mostly, and with no intention of meeting F2F. Ed’s experiences are aligned with the Hyperpersonal model in which he generates extreme impressions of other gamers. He either likes a person very much and possibly tries to play with them more, or dislikes them and avoids their presence. Members are visually anonymous, yet identify themselves through their common membership, which agrees with the SIDE theory of increased group salience since gamers have a whole culture and set of norms they abide.
The other day Ed refused to end his game prematurely since it was “rude” to leave after the grace period. Not only is it impolite to leave your fellow gamers hanging, but you can be penalized by the program by reducing your rank. Furthermore, in society, like any poor team player, he/she can be marked for their actions and become ostracized. Online, quitters can be marked by public feedback warn others that a player is uncommitted or uses inappropriate language, behavior, poor skill, etc. Another way to enforce a norm is through the “raising of the brow” via verbal confrontation, in which all members of a group can hear and reply to each other. And to more extreme cases, sometimes party leaders can kick out unwanted players.
Finally, the strongest way to enforce rules are through meta-bodies that have the maximum power/resources to solve disputes such as a government. Evolutionary psychology and Hobbes concept of the Leviathan would explain that people are willing to give up certain freedoms to empower a higher authority in order to preserve order. In this CmC medium, the code of conduct is enforced by Microsoft, which can choose to terminate or restrict your account, which reassures Ed.
Wallace further dwells on effects of conformity such as polarization. Ed for example loves playing different levels, but when he interacts with the same group members several rounds, he chooses to ignore his desire to switch to another level. This is probably due to the construction of a more cohesive group identity. People like to be liked by others, just like they like to be with similar people; add in a common goal, and a greater bond is formed between perfect strangers, generating conformative decisions. Polarization can also encourage online bullying. Ed’s profile name is “Vakanongo”, and a member was not able to pronounce it and thus baptized him as “Vagina” once. This was an active speaker within the group, and thus it was only a matter of time before the rest joined the alpha. Ed wasn’t too happy at first, but due to the repeated team successes and tighter bond, he conformed and even tried to think it was funny too.
I asked Ed if he had any problems trusting team players because they were anonymous. He explained that actually there IS an immediate sense of trust since you have the predisposed idea that people will do their best to win, if not why else would they be there? This was the first time I witnessed a high trust-bias within a CmC. Just as Evolutionary psychology explains that people need to trust community members to survive, the same applies in this environment. But I realized also that due to verbal/audio contact, more nonverbal and social cues were transmittable, not to mention that the feedback is immediate due to its synchronous nature. People could apologize, encourage or compliment others which strengthens ties of trust and builds a clearer venue of communication since transparency is important for trust in relationships.