MM #1: Online Gaming: Connecting to everyone, but connected to no one.

I’ve played games online for years, ever since I discovered Counter-Strike¬. For me, it seemed so magical, that I not only could play with anyone in the world, but would always have someone to play with. When your sister doesn’t really play video games and you don’t regularly play with friends, your options tend to be either play single player games or multiplayer with bots, which, though fun, couldn’t quite match up to an actual human player.
Having done so, I’ve made several observations, now that the magic has worn off. I’ve played with many different kinds of people, some of them pleasant, others no so much. Many of these are my own personal observations and people I’ve talked to have had a wide range to say about online gaming, from positive to negative.


Attitudes change greatly online. Many times for the worst:



Not everyone is a paragon of friendliness in real life. You’ve seen them before: whether they made snide remarks to a waitress, yelling at someone for a perceived wrong against them or are just prone to picking fights at the drop of a hat. However, for the most part there are consequences for such behaviors in real life: either you won’t have many friends; you won’t get hired at jobs or in extreme cases could get arrested.
Not so online. One of the advantages of being online is complete anonymity. Even if you manage to get an entire group of people online to hate you, all it takes is a new screen name and suddenly, your reputation is restored. The removal of any sort of meaningful consequences causes people to be less apt to control their actions. A lot of the reason homophobic, sexist and racist language is heavily associated with online gaming is that people have less qualms about saying such things when there are no consequences for doing so. Try saying some of the things heard in an online gaming session in a work or school environment and see what happens next time.




It feels much less personal playing against a person online than it does in real life:

Back when I got my first gaming system, a Super Nintendo, there was a controller port for a second player. This was the only way that two people could play at the same time. The next console I got, a Nintendo 64, had support for four players. Nowadays, games can support over a thousand players at the same time.
Though one thing was different about my older systems. The other players had to be in the same room as me. I fondly remember playing four player games of Goldeneye 007 with three others and not only having an intense game with them but also conversation thrown back and forth. However, I didn’t get to do this that often.
With online gaming, all I need is a console and an internet connection and I can jump right into a game. However, something feels lost along the way: a sense of social interaction. Even if I play a tabletop game with a person I’ve never met, it provides an opportunity for me to get to know the person. However, when playing online, it feels more like playing against a faceless nameless machine that occasionally calls you a noob. There have been cases where I’ve been able to get into a game and strike up conversation and even play together with others online and have enjoyed doing so. However, it still doesn't have quite the same atmosphere as a real life game would have.

These days, it seems that video games have less and less in the way of local multiplayer options. Even on consoles, they are focused more on online multiplayer, and if you want to play with more than two people, you'd need several more Xboxes. Heck, even LAN support is starting to fade away, with Starcraft II not offering it. Perhaps this is why I've been playing seeking to play tabletop games more and more these days: as much as I love online gaming, it still doesn't quite connect people the way traditional gaming does.