L/A
I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.
In 2005 I received a copy of World of Warcraft for my birthday. The game clocked in at 3 gigabytes—a behemoth by the standards of the early 2000s, so big that it had to be distributed across four different CDs. I installed those discs onto our creaking, overworked family PC and, hours later, created my first avatar: a humble dwarf paladin named Pumaras, who set off to explore a realm he would soon call home.
World of Warcraft was a singular experience, and completely unlike the lonesome corridors of Halo or Call of Duty. Millions of living, breathing human beings logged on to the game at the same time. They were dispersed across a massive digital landscape—digging up treasure, exploring catacombs, and, most importantly, creating a flourishing social milieu in the chat box at the bottom of the screen. Few feats could be accomplished by yourself in this place. Do you want to slay the dragon brooding at the summit of Blackrock Mountain? Then you must band together with a small army of fellow combatants to stand a chance. Need to stock up on some health potions? Then you’ll be bartering with someone who has mastered the alchemical arts. That was the magic of World of Warcraft. Play long enough and you’ll be enmeshed in a nation. You’ll find fellowship and rivalry. You might even make pals for life.
And I did. I played World of Warcraft nearly every day until I left for college, and as Pumaras scoured the map for adventure, he soon found communion with a small cadre of ride-or-die cohorts. Some were around my age, others were considerably older, but all of us were united in a sublime trinity of priorities: kill monsters, gain loot, and make jokes until the wee hours of the morning. It’s been too long for me to remember how I originally met those friends, but that’s the point. World of Warcraft was designed to function like a social organ: You’d see the same players congregating in its capital cities, searching for compatriots to join them on their next dungeon crawl. With time, those mercenary contacts cohered into something deeper and more real. Our usernames were saved in each other’s respective friends lists, and before long, we were chopping it up on voice chat. I was a lonely teenager in some respects, but my life in World of Warcraft was rich. I had friends in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Sydney. I didn’t know much about their inner lives, but we had the most important thing in common: We wanted to conquer the world, and we wanted to do it together.
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether. It used to be something of a faux pas to play without a microphone, but I honestly can’t remember the last time one of my fellow dwarves has beckoned me to join a voice channel.
This is part of a shift that can be felt across video game culture writ large. Even though some of the biggest franchises in the world—Fortnite, Call of Duty,League of Legends—pit a server’s worth of players against one another in lethal combat, the softer interactions those places once fomented are on the decline. We are all in front of our computers, paradoxically together and separate, like ships passing in the night.
This is a difficult trend to prove empirically, but it certainly has been felt by lifelong gamers. There are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture. (One video, titled “Modern Gaming Is Becoming More and More Isolated,” has over 500,000 views.) A similar despondence has struck the domains of Reddit and GameFAQs, which have historically served as the premier watering holes for fans of the hobby. (“No one uses voice chat these days,” wrote one user. “People don’t chat in gaming anymore,” added another.) On a more macro level, about half of Americans are currently experiencing loneliness, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, who represent the industry’s primary consumers. All of this is evidence of a generation that has come to believe that a reliable source of intimacy—even if it’s down the scope of a sniper rifle—has gone awry. I would find it pathetic if I didn’t totally relate.
Nina Freeman, a game designer and Twitch streamer, crystalized this sensation perfectly in her 2015 project Cibele. The game, which draws heavily from Freeman’s own life, allows the player to watch a World of Warcraft–like friendship bloom in real time. You take control of a girl who has met a stranger in the wide-open plains of a multiplayer RPG. As they cull monsters and empty coffers, the two souls grow closer—eventually falling in love. Cibele is an attempt to mirror the warmth that can be found between avatars. If it has a fundamental principle, it’s that video games can reveal surprising vulnerability when two people are in the same place with a common task. That, more than anything else, is what those GameFAQs threads are mourning.
“I think [games like World of Warcraft] can affect one’s willingness to open up to someone. You don’t have to deal with the layer of bodies. You don’t have to worry about the physical barrier. All of that is stripped away when you’re speaking through a video game,” said Freeman. “So I do think digital spaces are sometimes good at bringing people together, and make connecting easier. There is room for a closeness to develop when all you can do is talk.”
I never had a multiplayer romance, but like Freeman, when I think back on those days, the memories that surface have little to do with nuts-and-bolts gameplay. All of the dungeons we cleared served as a backdrop for long, elliptical moonlit conversations that teenage boys in the mid-2000s tended to have (Radiohead, the Iraq war, the comedy stylings of Dane Cook). Mitchell Winkie, a screenwriter in Los Angeles and my brother, was also a degenerate World of Warcraft sicko in his youth, and he recalls a moment when—after a long night in one of the game’s most daunting battlefields—he told his party leader that he needed to go to bed. “I brush my teeth, shut down my computer, and my fucking Razr phone rings,” he told me. “It’s my party leader, who is begging me to log back on, in a very sweet, not-scary way, just desperate because they don’t have enough man power to kill the final boss.” Sure enough, Mitchell popped out of bed and put his talents to use.
“I don’t think anything dropped for me, but I was a minor hero,” he continued. “And, looking back, obviously everyone knew I was such a young kid from my squeaky voice, but they all treated me very kindly and big-brotherly in a way I’ll never forget.”
Still, the positive social interactions players have found in video games over the years are easily outweighed by the negative ones. What is the cultural stereotype of a Call of Duty match on Xbox Live? Slurs, obscenities, and heavy-duty profanity, whipsawing back and forth at impossibly loud volumes. (I am reminded of this clip, in which a bright-eyed kid asks the rest of his team, in a prepubescent voice, how much candy they got for Halloween. Someone instantly shouts back, “Shut the fuck up!”) This problem is intensified further if you are gaming while not—precisely—a white heterosexual male. Racial epithets are commonplace, alongside standard-issue dude-bro misogyny. When the Anti-Defamation League surveyed this issue, it found that more than half of gamers have faced some form of discrimination in multiplayer settings.
So I was not surprised when Freeman told me that these days she seldom switches her microphone on during gaming sessions. “I play a lot of DOTA, and I’ve had it on anonymous mode for the last year,” she said, referring to an anti-harassment feature that automatically prevents other players from sending her in-game chat messages, or seeing her username at all.
This is the standard diagnosis for why video games have gotten less social. These arenas are rife with disruptive hate that can be difficult to moderate, so players have responded by turning inward. Ian Larson, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies video games, notes that the public squares in this hobby have largely moved off game servers and ensconced themselves on Discord—a platform that allows the creation of private chat servers for curated segments of the population. Within a Discord sanctum, argues Larson, players are able to fill their need for social interaction without wandering into the disarray of the digital public. “I know people who have game communities formed around a podcast they listen to, or a sports team they like,” said Larson. “I think people have found Discord to be more tuned to what they’re looking for than just going out into the wild.”
Joanna Lewis, at the University of Northern Colorado, researches the relationship between video games and loneliness and takes this premise even further. Lewis argues that the generation eager to play a massively multiplayer online video game in 2005 was itself a uniquely self-selecting group—akin to the Discord communities of today. I think she’s onto something. My early World of Warcraft friends were curious about the emergent technology represented by the game, and perhaps more willing to actualize its metaversal possibility. It was genuinely exotic to go online and communicate with a stranger at the turn of the century, but we simply do not have that relationship with the internet anymore. Everyone is on the internet now, and naturally, that has brought a much more unwieldy influx of humanity into digital environs.
“We’re being exposed to everyone’s perspective,” said Lewis. “That can be good, and it can be bad, but it’s made people a bit more cautious about what we open ourselves up to.”
I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.
In 2005 I received a copy of World of Warcraft for my birthday. The game clocked in at 3 gigabytes—a behemoth by the standards of the early 2000s, so big that it had to be distributed across four different CDs. I installed those discs onto our creaking, overworked family PC and, hours later, created my first avatar: a humble dwarf paladin named Pumaras, who set off to explore a realm he would soon call home.
World of Warcraft was a singular experience, and completely unlike the lonesome corridors of Halo or Call of Duty. Millions of living, breathing human beings logged on to the game at the same time. They were dispersed across a massive digital landscape—digging up treasure, exploring catacombs, and, most importantly, creating a flourishing social milieu in the chat box at the bottom of the screen. Few feats could be accomplished by yourself in this place. Do you want to slay the dragon brooding at the summit of Blackrock Mountain? Then you must band together with a small army of fellow combatants to stand a chance. Need to stock up on some health potions? Then you’ll be bartering with someone who has mastered the alchemical arts. That was the magic of World of Warcraft. Play long enough and you’ll be enmeshed in a nation. You’ll find fellowship and rivalry. You might even make pals for life.
And I did. I played World of Warcraft nearly every day until I left for college, and as Pumaras scoured the map for adventure, he soon found communion with a small cadre of ride-or-die cohorts. Some were around my age, others were considerably older, but all of us were united in a sublime trinity of priorities: kill monsters, gain loot, and make jokes until the wee hours of the morning. It’s been too long for me to remember how I originally met those friends, but that’s the point. World of Warcraft was designed to function like a social organ: You’d see the same players congregating in its capital cities, searching for compatriots to join them on their next dungeon crawl. With time, those mercenary contacts cohered into something deeper and more real. Our usernames were saved in each other’s respective friends lists, and before long, we were chopping it up on voice chat. I was a lonely teenager in some respects, but my life in World of Warcraft was rich. I had friends in North Carolina, Arkansas, and Sydney. I didn’t know much about their inner lives, but we had the most important thing in common: We wanted to conquer the world, and we wanted to do it together.
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether. It used to be something of a faux pas to play without a microphone, but I honestly can’t remember the last time one of my fellow dwarves has beckoned me to join a voice channel.
This is part of a shift that can be felt across video game culture writ large. Even though some of the biggest franchises in the world—Fortnite, Call of Duty,League of Legends—pit a server’s worth of players against one another in lethal combat, the softer interactions those places once fomented are on the decline. We are all in front of our computers, paradoxically together and separate, like ships passing in the night.
This is a difficult trend to prove empirically, but it certainly has been felt by lifelong gamers. There are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture. (One video, titled “Modern Gaming Is Becoming More and More Isolated,” has over 500,000 views.) A similar despondence has struck the domains of Reddit and GameFAQs, which have historically served as the premier watering holes for fans of the hobby. (“No one uses voice chat these days,” wrote one user. “People don’t chat in gaming anymore,” added another.) On a more macro level, about half of Americans are currently experiencing loneliness, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, who represent the industry’s primary consumers. All of this is evidence of a generation that has come to believe that a reliable source of intimacy—even if it’s down the scope of a sniper rifle—has gone awry. I would find it pathetic if I didn’t totally relate.
Nina Freeman, a game designer and Twitch streamer, crystalized this sensation perfectly in her 2015 project Cibele. The game, which draws heavily from Freeman’s own life, allows the player to watch a World of Warcraft–like friendship bloom in real time. You take control of a girl who has met a stranger in the wide-open plains of a multiplayer RPG. As they cull monsters and empty coffers, the two souls grow closer—eventually falling in love. Cibele is an attempt to mirror the warmth that can be found between avatars. If it has a fundamental principle, it’s that video games can reveal surprising vulnerability when two people are in the same place with a common task. That, more than anything else, is what those GameFAQs threads are mourning.
“I think [games like World of Warcraft] can affect one’s willingness to open up to someone. You don’t have to deal with the layer of bodies. You don’t have to worry about the physical barrier. All of that is stripped away when you’re speaking through a video game,” said Freeman. “So I do think digital spaces are sometimes good at bringing people together, and make connecting easier. There is room for a closeness to develop when all you can do is talk.”
I never had a multiplayer romance, but like Freeman, when I think back on those days, the memories that surface have little to do with nuts-and-bolts gameplay. All of the dungeons we cleared served as a backdrop for long, elliptical moonlit conversations that teenage boys in the mid-2000s tended to have (Radiohead, the Iraq war, the comedy stylings of Dane Cook). Mitchell Winkie, a screenwriter in Los Angeles and my brother, was also a degenerate World of Warcraft sicko in his youth, and he recalls a moment when—after a long night in one of the game’s most daunting battlefields—he told his party leader that he needed to go to bed. “I brush my teeth, shut down my computer, and my fucking Razr phone rings,” he told me. “It’s my party leader, who is begging me to log back on, in a very sweet, not-scary way, just desperate because they don’t have enough man power to kill the final boss.” Sure enough, Mitchell popped out of bed and put his talents to use.
“I don’t think anything dropped for me, but I was a minor hero,” he continued. “And, looking back, obviously everyone knew I was such a young kid from my squeaky voice, but they all treated me very kindly and big-brotherly in a way I’ll never forget.”
Still, the positive social interactions players have found in video games over the years are easily outweighed by the negative ones. What is the cultural stereotype of a Call of Duty match on Xbox Live? Slurs, obscenities, and heavy-duty profanity, whipsawing back and forth at impossibly loud volumes. (I am reminded of this clip, in which a bright-eyed kid asks the rest of his team, in a prepubescent voice, how much candy they got for Halloween. Someone instantly shouts back, “Shut the fuck up!”) This problem is intensified further if you are gaming while not—precisely—a white heterosexual male. Racial epithets are commonplace, alongside standard-issue dude-bro misogyny. When the Anti-Defamation League surveyed this issue, it found that more than half of gamers have faced some form of discrimination in multiplayer settings.
So I was not surprised when Freeman told me that these days she seldom switches her microphone on during gaming sessions. “I play a lot of DOTA, and I’ve had it on anonymous mode for the last year,” she said, referring to an anti-harassment feature that automatically prevents other players from sending her in-game chat messages, or seeing her username at all.
This is the standard diagnosis for why video games have gotten less social. These arenas are rife with disruptive hate that can be difficult to moderate, so players have responded by turning inward. Ian Larson, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies video games, notes that the public squares in this hobby have largely moved off game servers and ensconced themselves on Discord—a platform that allows the creation of private chat servers for curated segments of the population. Within a Discord sanctum, argues Larson, players are able to fill their need for social interaction without wandering into the disarray of the digital public. “I know people who have game communities formed around a podcast they listen to, or a sports team they like,” said Larson. “I think people have found Discord to be more tuned to what they’re looking for than just going out into the wild.”
Joanna Lewis, at the University of Northern Colorado, researches the relationship between video games and loneliness and takes this premise even further. Lewis argues that the generation eager to play a massively multiplayer online video game in 2005 was itself a uniquely self-selecting group—akin to the Discord communities of today. I think she’s onto something. My early World of Warcraft friends were curious about the emergent technology represented by the game, and perhaps more willing to actualize its metaversal possibility. It was genuinely exotic to go online and communicate with a stranger at the turn of the century, but we simply do not have that relationship with the internet anymore. Everyone is on the internet now, and naturally, that has brought a much more unwieldy influx of humanity into digital environs.
“We’re being exposed to everyone’s perspective,” said Lewis. “That can be good, and it can be bad, but it’s made people a bit more cautious about what we open ourselves up to.”
