Online Gaming: A social, or anti-social medium?

Much of what we do on the Internet revolves around our obsessions. Generally speaking, people who spend hours on end browsing Facebook are obsessed with their friends. People who spend the best part of their day finding and listening to new music on Last.fm are obsessed with music. Whilst people who spend every waking hour playing World of Warcraft are – you guessed it – obsessed with online gaming. Many people however, obsess over their friends, and everyone claims to be obsessed with music; but few people would dare admit they are obsessed with gaming. There are many reasons for this and over the next week I will take a look at the way we understand online gaming, why some people hate the idea of it, while others are more comfortable living their lives in an online game.

The first game I ever played online was the original Quake. I was 16 years-old when I connected to my first gaming server and I used to play in several different Quake clans at one point or another. Gaming clans are an online gamer’s idea of a team and one of my first Quake clans was called Numeric. As a member of Numeric I would be expected to play clan matches nearly every other evening; usually lasting about an hour, playing a 4v4 match against another clan. By being a member of a gaming clan you are part of an entirely unique and close-knit community, an eSports team that in many ways resembles a real-life sports team; and just like any other team sport it requires practice.  I also grew up playing rugby, and would train at least 3 times a week with games at the weekend, meaning that sometimes I would be playing Rugby up to 5 days a week. Noone will ever tell a member of a sports team that by practicing 5 days a week, they are being anti-social, but members of an eSports team are told this all the time. My parents were, understandably, fully supportive of me playing rugby, but unsurprisingly they were not supportive of my online gaming.

“Off the computer now, stop Quake’ing, stop being anti-social” my parents would say, whilst I would argue that “I’m being social! I’m playing Quake with other players from around the world”. Sometimes my argument would prevail and sometimes it would not. If I won the argument I was allowed to keep playing, if I lost the argument I would go read a book, watch television, or if it was not too cold, go hang out with ‘real-life’ friends. What is it that makes us feel that one is more acceptable than the other? Or more specifically, what is it that makes sitting at a computer anti-social; whilst watching television with your parents or hanging out with friends as social?

This is a question which I have often thought about whilst trying to justify my own interest in online gaming. When using your computer, you are more than likely on your own, and so if you use your computer to play games every evening, then it is easy to argue that you are being anti-social. However, when you play games online this argument becomes more ambiguous, because through your computer you are talking to and connecting with more people then you are ever likely to know in the real-world. When we consider online gaming in this way, it becomes difficult to decide whether it is a social or anti-social medium.

In order to better understand this question, my next post will attempt to differentiate between our online and offline connections. Furthermore, by judging the quality of these connections and the ways in which we interact with people in real-life and through online gaming, I will begin to evaluate whether this particular online medium is social, or anti-social.