Maroon 311wo other important socializing activities that result from onsite T
meet-ups warrant brief exploration: dating and gaming. A growing num-
ber of cybers offer dedicated stations for action games, and during my
field research, it was becoming quite popular among young men to ren-
dezvous in cybercafés for the purpose of competing in networked gam-
ing. I had been in the field for a little over a month when I started to pay
attention to this phenomenon. It was just a few days after 11 September
2001, and I was sitting at an individual terminal in a Casablancan cyber
called Twin’s Net sending email messages to friends and family in New
York City. Suddenly, someone yelled, “Osama!!! Osama!!!” and imitated
the sounds of a machine gun firing. The person yelling had just shot the
terrorist in an online military style “shooter” game in which players start
off with machine guns and acquire additional arms by killing terrorists
at large, thereby gaining points to purchase more munitions and weap-
onry and to win the game. Because a hefty bounty had been placed on
the head of Osama bin Laden in the wake of the 11 September attacks,
the Moroccan gamers made a common joke of declaring they had killed
the online “Osama” and that they deserved immediate payment of the
reward money. This convergence of real world events with virtual play
paints an unexpected scene of dissonance in which young Muslim males
find amusement in posing as virtual American military men and killing
onscreen Arab terrorists.
e gaming area is the only space in cybercafés where one finds Th
gender segregation. In areas where the typical cubicles are located (with-
out linked gaming capabilities), men and women can be seen sitting side
by side, but the gaming area is exclusively male. During the mid-morning
and late afternoon hours, however, when many of the young men who
make up the gaming groups are at school, the gaming tables are used by
both men and women for a different purpose: Internet telephone calls.
The introduction of software like Skype has made it possible to call
friends over the Internet at cybercafés. When I conducted fieldwork in
2001–2002, Skype was only installed at a few cybers (usually in the gaming
area, which sometimes resulted in a battle for territory between gamers
and callers). When I returned in the summer of 2007, however, virtually
every cyber I visited had Skype activated on computer desktops and pro-
vided headsets for phone calls and multimedia use. Sometimes people use