So how are we doing abstaining? ...Let's just say I'm not playing as good a game as I talk, but you'll have to stay tuned for this week's Aberrant Gamer column for the full, dirty story.I knew this experiment would be useful for exploring how much of a social activity gaming really is -- or isn't. I mean, social gaming is the future, right? On one hand, that's eminently clear. Wii developers are asked to make family-friendly games that people can play together, and when an Xbox title hits shelves without online multiplayer, it's marked prominently against it in reviews. The new frontier is all-ages "casual" MMOs -- if you had said "casual MMO" to me a year ago, I would have thought you were being oxymoronic, but here we are. "Social" "online" and "mainstream" are now very nearly synonymous; as proof of my point, here is a WoW commercial starring Mr. T, which airs on major network television:
The message? Everybody's doing it. I recently wrote about how the barriers between gamers and non-gamers are becoming whisper-thin and arbitrary, and even more recently, I wrote about how the boundary between online social media and gaming is nearly gone. Casual gamers and 'core gamers, online "netizens" and MySpace addicts, all about to link arms and skip off into the sunset together, watching Blu-ray movies on PS3, Skyping on PSP, playing Carcasonne online against some old dude in Germany, watching game trailers inside of online social worlds.
I do not regularly play even one online game. I haven't, and have never had, any interest whatsoever in WoW. I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've played against another person on Live. My friend and I are supposed to play co-op Guitar Hero one of these days -- I just never seem to feel like doing it. I use Live to send him harassing text messages while he's playing Halo, and that's about it. I realize I'm in the minority -- perhaps a sliver-thin minority.
But then, how would I know? After all, if there are other recluse gamers -- those simply prefer to play alone -- it's not like they'd necessarily be blogging, participating in polls, and commenting in forum threads about it, would they? At least, not with the same vociferousness as does the Facebook Generation. But am I really alone?
As I said, I'm learning some interesting things from the Abstinence Experiment, and one of them is my individual motivation for playing. Put simply, I have a job where I have to focus all day on verifying and interpreting facts. I live in a city with nearly eight million other wildly noisy human beings. I'm exceedingly "plugged in" -- I work on a computer all day, where friends, acquaintances, coworkers and total strangers alike can and do access me on a near-constant basis. When it's time to play, I want nothing more than to pull that cord that wires me to all of these other people, and all of these very grounded and substantive issues. I want to boss fake people around, make them blow things up, save the world and do all of the other things that are either too exciting, too fantastical or too inhumanly terrible for me to do myself.
I've been equally disinterested in another trend to come out of the tumbling-down of boundaries in the various spheres of online social media and gaming -- the whole personalization angle. Virtual worlds and casual MMOs have found success to rival WoW's by giving their users innumerable ways to "be themselves" in a world or game. This ties into advertiser interests, granted -- they'll put Kitson hoodies and Pontiac cars inside of certain games and online worlds for brand presence, and the game company makes cash -- but the funny thing is, lots of users want these things. In an online game, you can be a Gucci Girl fashion plate for $2, instead of $20,000.
But the desire on the part of users to represent themselves as idealized versions of their real selves isn't new -- isn't that, at least partially, what those Lvl 75 Blood Elf Paladins are all about? Isn't that part of the appeal of good-looking, complex game protagonists?
As for me, I'm plenty happy being myself in real life, and something entirely different in a game. I look at myself every day in the mirror; I don't want to look at myself in a game, too. I'm not that interesting. My guess is -- and again, I could be dead wrong here -- that most people who played Mass Effect did not make Shepard look anything like themselves, unless it was in that inadvertent way in which all art reflects its creator, in that mind's-eye memory of the face with which the artist is most familiar (his own).
The point is, if I want to express myself and socialize with my friends, I'll make plans, get dressed and go out. I realize that this kind of gaming represents a new and different way for me to do this -- but if it comes at the expense of the old glazed-out solitary marathons, however unglamorous those are, I confess, I'll be sad.
Over the last 18 months or so, hardcore gamers complained they were being passed over in favor of the lucrative new casual market; we've now come to a sort of happy truce, I think. But if the era of distinguishing between hardcore and casual gamers is coming to an end, will a new line be drawn in the sand between social gamers and anti-social ones? And will we single-players be left behind?
