Entertainment (enjoyment, the authentic self) and socializing separated. People watched TV alone, and then people gamed alone and then people scrolled social media together but not really and they were still basically alone.
I think it’s fairly likely that the pattern will be interrupted with VR. The reasons are dumb. VR headsets package in good microphones and spacialized audio makes talking in groups fun again. We’ll start to see better team games, or just social venues where people mix and talk for its own sake. Then the social online world will be a lot more enticing.
People used to game together. These days, you can’t even put a chat window in your online card game because you have to hire moderators to deal with people being assholes to each other and/or would-be child molesters, and that’s a whole lot more expensive than just not letting players talk to each other. Unless you’re World of Warcraft, it just doesn’t pay.
Another data point on this theory. When I was a child “computer games” meant 5 overexcited children screaming and shoving one another off a sofa while at any one time 4 out of 5 of them were nominally playing on the nintendo (mario kart and party were particularly popular). This clearly shifted a lot, because around 2018 I remember returning a new halo game when I found out it couldn’t do split-screen. (It honestly never occurred to me to check, a shooter without split screen just feels, awful).
To me, the new “bowling alone” is “FPS without split screen”.
Meanwhile, split-screen seems to me to be such a patently horrible way to play an FPS that I can’t imagine anyone liking it (and I’ve been playing FPSes since FPSes existed).
The idea that placing a helmet over one’s head that obscures visual and audio perception of the real world will somehow interrupt the separation of socialization assumes that digital socialization is a replacement for or at least some kind of remedy to not having IRL interactions. To me this seems an exacerbation of the problem, not an alleviation.
Entertainment (enjoyment, the authentic self) and socializing separated. People watched TV alone, and then people gamed alone and then people scrolled social media together but not really and they were still basically alone.
I think it’s fairly likely that the pattern will be interrupted with VR. The reasons are dumb. VR headsets package in good microphones and spacialized audio makes talking in groups fun again. We’ll start to see better team games, or just social venues where people mix and talk for its own sake. Then the social online world will be a lot more enticing.
People used to game together. These days, you can’t even put a chat window in your online card game because you have to hire moderators to deal with people being assholes to each other and/or would-be child molesters, and that’s a whole lot more expensive than just not letting players talk to each other. Unless you’re World of Warcraft, it just doesn’t pay.
Another data point on this theory. When I was a child “computer games” meant 5 overexcited children screaming and shoving one another off a sofa while at any one time 4 out of 5 of them were nominally playing on the nintendo (mario kart and party were particularly popular). This clearly shifted a lot, because around 2018 I remember returning a new halo game when I found out it couldn’t do split-screen. (It honestly never occurred to me to check, a shooter without split screen just feels, awful).
To me, the new “bowling alone” is “FPS without split screen”.
Meanwhile, split-screen seems to me to be such a patently horrible way to play an FPS that I can’t imagine anyone liking it (and I’ve been playing FPSes since FPSes existed).
Large language models may soon (if not already) make it much easier and cheaper to moderate such spaces, so maybe we’ll see a resurgence of that?
The idea that placing a helmet over one’s head that obscures visual and audio perception of the real world will somehow interrupt the separation of socialization assumes that digital socialization is a replacement for or at least some kind of remedy to not having IRL interactions. To me this seems an exacerbation of the problem, not an alleviation.