Video games are shaping the social spaces of the future
“I think of video game communication [via headsets] as the logical extension of children texting on their phones. What you might see today is someone playing Fortnite with their friends and talking about school, joking around while playing this shared activity.”
These are the words of Andrew Fishman, 31, a therapist and social worker who specialises in adolescents who “play too many video games”. But he doesn’t see the games themselves as the only problem. In fact for many people in the constantly evolving digital age, they might be the solution.
The days when social events like going to festivals or to the cinema purely happen in the real world are gone. Fortnite alone is holding virtual musical performances from the likes of Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, and even screening Christopher Nolan movies. Whether or not most of us keep up, online social spaces aren’t just chat rooms or comment sections any longer.
Fishman notices an immediate benefit to video games being a social space, saying “games make those uncomfortable pauses in the conversation less uncomfortable, you’re doing something so it doesn’t feel strange to have a moment of silence like you might when you’re in person or on a date.”
This is part of the versatility that video games offer. They aren’t limited to one activity or one form of communication. They can be both a completely social experience or one focused on an objective.
“I sometimes compare it to live sports,” Fishman says. “If I’m playing American football and I’m yelling to my teammates to accomplish our shared goal, we’re not sharing anything emotional, but we are working together toward a common goal. That is very human and deeply bonding, in a tribal sort of sense.”
The bonding found in video games comes in many different forms, from being purely social to more competitive, which is why despite people often not interacting in person, games can offer diverse social situations.
Diverse online situations aren’t always going to be positive though. Toxic behaviour — where players shout abuse, play without sportsmanship, and sometimes even hack others — is prevalent in gaming.
“When you’re online and you can be anybody you could say whatever you want with zero consequences,” explains Fishman. “I don’t have a solid answer on how to tackle that.”
But Warwick Esports does.
1000 members strong, Warwick Esports is a purpose built online community for University of Warwick students to arrange, play, and chat about video games. Almost all the games they play are competitive, and so Discord — an online server hosting tool built around video games that allows for different voice and text chats — is used. 18 committee members then keep the community in check.
“The reason the society started on Discord was precisely so people could play games together, that’s the whole point,” says Adriano “Adri” Barbet, 20, Warwick Esports partnerships and data analyst. “The social aspect is crucial. That’s why when we try to run events and game tournaments, we try to run long term events.”
Having these online tournaments means that the small teams bond on a more personal level over the course of around a week or so. “We found that this let people connect with their team the best, they know their team mates, and they’re confident when talking to them,” Barbet adds.
The reason all of this works so well for Warwick Esports is in-part down to the communities ‘Code Of Conduct’. In most online games players can report one another for things like cheating and offensive language, but it doesn’t always get moderated well. Warwick Esports makes sure that its manpower matches its scale, so the rules set out when people join to keep the space positive can be enforced.
One thing Warwick Esports is very adamant about is stepping outside of its online play and not limiting its community to Discord. Everything is still rooted to the online aspect, but the society shows that what can start as an online social community can actually evolve into something more.
They host activities that can range from typical university events to what they call ‘Sports Sundays’, where different game servers will meet up and play a real life sport.
“It’s actually quite nice because you’re competing against other gamers, so most of us are on the same sporting level, especially when we pick a random sport,” Alex Petropoulos, 20, told me. He’s the director of communications for Warwick Esports and going into his fourth year.
“As a society we try to discourage the cliques because we want to keep people within the server who haven’t joined those other groups to help keep activity up and allow people to engage.” Petropoulos says. “But it does become very cliquey at different levels, from what game you’re playing, and at what level you’re playing at.”
As online communities can be made up of different games they can quite easily become segmented if not managed. Everyone is in the same online space, but if they have little reason to come out into the wider environment, they won’t.
Over time, these events and activities help people drift from just talking about the reason they came together in the first place, the games. This talk is already being filled when the groups play together says Petropoulos, so people will “start talking about other things.”
Despite this, it’s still vital to note that these multiplayer games are what brought the people together in the first place, and this is perfectly exemplified by how people still communicate via their ‘alias’.
“Online we talk to each other and refer to each other with our ‘alias’ on top of regular names. In these communities you actually end up having a second name, and people end up calling you that in real life,” Petropoulos says.
The alias is the name you give yourself, typically the username of the account you use to play. Because this is the name most people see when they first ‘meet’ in an online game, it’s how people often refer to themselves outside the game as well.
It acts as a reminder that the game is central to these social interactions, whether people are actively playing or meeting up in person.
The game is the reason these people met in the first place.
