Socialising and Games

How much do we really need to socialise when playing games?

I remember reading in an article once that the feeling of boredom is the result of loneliness, used as a stimulation to socialise much like hunger comes from not eating. The idea behind this ridiculous philosophy was that humans need to socialise and that television, games and all the other fun things in life are incorrectly being used to cure us of our loneliness.

Personally, I think it’s a load of ol’ bunkum.

Aside from the complete dismissal of individuality and that humans don’t need to socialise in order to survive, there is an interesting point here though. Well, tangentially speaking.

Will all game experiences have a communal aspect? Is the increased emphasis on social interaction in games a result of becoming part of the popular culture?

With the arrival of widespread internet connectivity, communication and contact seem to be the core focus of everything lately, especially gaming.

Starting with the PC and games like Doom, this evolved and moved onto the Dreamcast and started MMO games. Today all sorts of games can be played online and not always with direct contact, Dark Souls and Journey feature a subtle interactivity which means that you don’t converse at all with a fellow player.

Then there are the Facebook and Mobile type social games that actively endorse social activity.

I’ve often played Journey thinking I was playing with the same person, only to discover they were 20 different people at the end.

It’s not just games either now, with the Wii-U becoming more online friendly and bolstering its online shop with a slew of indie titles and the Playstation 4 having been announced with a share button and live video streaming, we’ve never gamed so close to our online friends.

The rumours of the next Microsoft console have caused an uproar and if they were thinking of making it online only, the recent outcry would surely make them think again.

Not being a particularly “communicatively astute” person myself, the thought of more games getting social features puts a shudder down my spine. I hardly play online nor do I play Facebook games or use a Smartphone (or any phone for that matter). Games are saturated with multiplayer or DLC content so nothing is a complete and independent experience anymore. This can be very divisive and there has often been times I just haven’t bothered with buying a game because I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of finding out the best version to get or even just having to download all of the preorder items.

To me, one of the better reasons for this shift in the industry was the hope that the large networks of people being able to talk quickly and without external management would make game companies more wary of releasing a bad game, tas word would spread, thus increasing the overall quality of games. At very least I was looking forward to the new consoles becoming more backwards friendly, as being mostly digital it wouldn’t be too hard nor with the large leaps in technology too difficult to emulate, also nobody would want to lose an entire persona they had spent years building because a new console came out.

But unfortunately this has not been the case as with the PS4, it has no backwards compatibility and the profile you had will be no longer mean much, with them opting instead to go for a more spontaneous system of sharing immediately and the Wii-U’ isn’t much better with its lack of Gamecube compat and difficult Virtual Console transfer.

Monaco, where the first thing you can do is piss in a toilet.

But how many times in a game do you feel the need to “share” your experience? I certainly don’t very often, as someone who likes to write and play games, I’ve found that on the very rare occasions I whimsically wish to “share” my experience, turning over to my computer or just waiting until the end of my gaming session suffices.

Would I sacrifice room on a controller for the privilege of instant sharing? No. Do I fancy having another button to collect dirt and need cleaning once a month? Not without a complimentary maid, no.

The culture of social profiles on your gaming console has already made the solitary enjoyment of playing a game, into a huge public funfair where everybody can see what you are playing and when. Throw in an all seeing Kinect or the stats accumulating software that Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony no doubt already use whenever we play online and I can’t help but feel an overwhelming Orwellian fear encompassing my every purchase.

The more companies look at these noncontextual facts of how we play and how often, the less we see of games being an art form and more of being a product, a cash cow waiting to shift by the numbers. They’ll see that you spend hours playing Call of Duty or Farmville, and a minute amount of time playing Journey and attempt to monetise that, taking out the enjoyment factor and the reasons fuelling your game habits and just look at the raw numbers.

Perhaps this is mostly a fad. On the day I write this Reuters has announced Zynga’s 10% loss in shares and recently Ken Levine stated he threw out the multiplayer ideas for Bioshock Infinite in favour of strengthening the core story. Gamers are showing that they want more than to talk about their games, they want to play them.

Games are going to be more social now, because more social people are playing them. Not that I am convinced by it, I’m not going to start socialising in my games any time soon, but I’ll quite happily join in when we invent holo-decks.

Socialising and Games