Online Gaming: Would you ever receive an ASBO for gaming?

This is my third and final post on the growing phenomenon of online gaming, and whether it should be considered a form of social media. My first post began by exploring why playing games online is a debatable social medium, whilst my second post questioned whether it should be considered a form of media in the traditional sense. This final post will attempt to understand what we mean when saying our online activities, especially gaming, are ‘social’ activities.

Last time I looked at Bryan Eisenberg’s definition of social media as “platforms for interaction and relationships”; which is a great way of understanding the differences social media presents us with when compared to traditional media. If we also consider The Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition of ‘social’ as “capable of being associated or united to others”, we can further appreciate how interacting and building relationships is almost certainly a social activity.

Social media activities we undertake are more often than not undertaken on our own; browsing our profiles on Facebook for example or checking our friends music on Last.fm. The social platforms these websites provide allow us to effectively interact with people and build relationships by spending time on our own. Furthermore, the activities we undertake on Facebook will generally take less than an hour, and it can be quite difficult to spend endless hours looking at other peoples musical tastes on Last.fm. You are certainly not ‘lost’ in websites such as these, and you can always hold a conversation with people in the real-world whilst browsing these sites which is what makes these activities easier to understand as sociable activities. Now compare this to online gaming where it is more difficult to have a conversation whilst playing, where you can literally escape the real world and live a life of fantasy; a platform where people can easily spend consecutive hours playing games and become detached from the real-world. This is why people are often quick to judge online-gamers as anti-social, but we should not forget that they are actually playing these games with millions of other people from around the world, and so we need a better way of differentiating between socialising online and socialising in the real-world.

Certainly in the purest sense, both hanging out with friends down the pub, and playing games online could be considered a social activity, because both involve you interacting and building relations with real-life people. The biggest difference between these two activities however, lie in the connections you have with the people you are socialising with. If you are in the pub with a group of friends, then you are very closely connected to these people in both time and space; whilst if you are sat at a computer you are connected in time, but very rarely in space. This quality of your connection is what is different between being sociable in real-life and sociable on the internet. If we also consider our relations to the people we are connected with, then we can also appreciate how family and close friends provide a much better quality of connection; and it is these closer connections that allow us to mature and develop as an individual; thus building our social skills which are essential for progressing through life. This is why my parents were possibly right in thinking that sitting watching television with them or going to hang out with friends is a more sociable activity then playing games online.

Though I do wonder whether parents would rather their children were in a team of Shamans and Warlocks, raiding the ‘Temple of Ahn’Qiraj‘ for the eye of C’Thun, receiving the Ring of the Fallen Gods as a reward. Or whether they would prefer them to be in a group of knife-wielding youths raiding the local Tesco for alcohol and cigarettes, receiving an Anti-Social Behaviour Order for their troubles. The irony of this scenario contradicts everything my parents told me, because I know that some people who I was told to hang-out with got such a reward. Perhaps the best way of being social is to simply attend a Lan Party, being connected with lots of people in time and space, whilst also being dettached from the vices of the real-world.