Social networking is huge these days. Popular web metric Compete.com estimates that on average, nearly one hundred million unique users visit the pages of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn every month. That number, if accurate, is one-third the entire population of the United States, the third-largest country in the world.
While its climb is not nearly as pronounced, social gaming is also on the rise. Just look at the work of New York Times writer Seth Schiesel. Writing about gaming in American society for one of the most influential newspapers in the world, Schiesel has been closely monitoring the paradigm shift — from gaming as a niche hobby to gaming as a social phenomenon — for the past several years.
The Rise of Social Gaming
In 2005 Schiesel wrote “What Good Is Sitting Alone Killing Friends?” in which he reminisces about the competitive community of gamers who never met one another but enjoyed friendly competition via arcade machines’ high score tables, and how next (now current) generation game consoles might revitalize such competition through online play. In August of 2006, his article “The Video Game Industry Has an Image Problem and Mostly Itself to Blame,” spoke to gaming’s inability to pull out of the niche it had dug for itself.
If someone asks you what you did this weekend, and you respond, “Ah, I was kind of tired and just hung out at home and watched a bunch of movies,” that’s normal. If you say, “Ah, I was kind of tired and just hung out at home and watched a bunch of sports on TV,” that’s normal. But if you say, “Ah, I was kind of tired and just hung out at home and played a bunch of video games,” that is simply not a normal adult response in most social circles.
But three months later, in November 2006, Schiesel told us exactly how gaming would surpass that niche — the Nintendo Wii — and in September 2007 proudly declared that “Causal Fans Are Driving Growth of Video Games.”
And as we reach the modern day, there’s a visible addition to the vernacular. As Schiesel presents the Activision Blizzard merger as “Evidence of How Much the Gaming World Has Changed,” the best-selling World of Warcraft is described as more than just a tool to expand a gaming audience: it’s a “paradigm-busting” social game. In an interview with Robert Kotick, then CEO of Activision:
“I take a step back and I look at World of Warcraft not so much as a game but as game meets social networking,” Mr. Kotick added. “It has as much in common with Yahoo message boards or MySpace or Facebook as anything else, and it’s very powerful once you start thinking of games in that way.”
February 1st, 2008. Schiesel writes:
If new acceptance by the masses is one pillar of gaming’s future, gaming’s emergence as a social phenomenon is the other. Hard-core gamers are still willing to spend 30 hours playing alone through a single-player story line, but most people want more human contact in their entertainment.
His evidence is simple yet unimpeachable: critically acclaimed, story-driven single-player titles like Bioshock, Mass Effect and God of War II all failed to make the make the top ten list of best-selling titles for 2007, where they would have been sure bets only a few years before. Instead, multiplayer-focused affairs like Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 took top billing.
Some might say “the rest is history.” I say we’re not finished yet. Why?
Because the concept of social gaming is inherently flawed — and the answer lies not in that massive online scoreboard, but in each other.
Social gaming?
You don’t have to look very far to find an academic complaining about the fragmentation of society, and for good reason: it’s all around us. Guided by the same self-interest that fuels capitalism and set free by a host of technological feats, those with matching, often niche interests seperate themselves from neighbors and family, clustering together in virtual spaces instead of physical ones — and some say, treat the real world that much carelessly as a result. You’d think social gaming would be a force to bring us together again, but that all depends on how we define a social game.
The problem with so many supposedly social online games, especially those focused on combat, is that they’re fire-and-forget: First you fire (or throw a fireball) and then you rapidly forget who you were playing with. One of the worst offenders is the is the Nintendo Wii’s own Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where, without a single channel of communication between players, there’s no way to tell if one is facing off against a human opponent at all. Games like the aforementioned Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 fare better, adding voice and online buddies to the mix, but such shooters still can’t even compare to the pure social experience of sitting down with a real, live friend — like Clive Thompson wrote earlier this week — and are a far cry from the feeling of being involved in a real community.
But what if there were a new type of game that not only rewards you for interacting with your existing friends (like Rock Band) but actually caused you to become more interested and involved in your local community?
Local gaming
Gaming’s next paradigm shift comes from the providence of a different New York Times reporter — Brad Stone — and takes its cues not from 1980’s arcades, but from social networking circa 2004.
Few of today’s 67 million active Facebook subscribers will ever know the social networking service as I and my fellow college students knew it in late 2004. Today, Facebook is a part of the internet cloud floating over the world, a confusing mist of trendy applications, a sea of faces and names and a mountain of personal data. But in 2004, things were different: “thefacebook.com” was tied to the earth. Everywhere I went across my college campus there were people I would recognize from Facebook; and every time I visited Facebook I would run across others from campus. Facebook became a tool to connect with others around oneself more quickly than ever before, and the mutual reinforcement of physical and virtual gave birth to something greater — a sense of community.
And now, gaming may have found its Facebook thanks to students at Yale University. Last week, Brad Stone wrote about a pair of very similar games, GoCrossCampus and Turf. Both brainchilds of Yale graduate Gabe Smedresman, they are basically turn-based games of Risk, but with one incredibly powerful difference: they’re played on overhead representations of real-world locations, and by the same persons who inhabit those locations. And they look so promising that software giant Google will be trying them out in their own New York offices next month, and not for recreation, but for collaboration.
“This kind of game is a product of how people live and interact today, with the offline aspect as part of the draw,” said Jonathan Rochelle, a New York product manager at Google who discovered the game as an adviser to the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. He views it as similar to software like Google Calendar and Google Docs — tools that enhance real-world collaboration.
“Rather than isolating us in an online world, it enhances our interactions in the real world,” Mr. Rochelle said.
Stone compares the games to intramural sports, rather than their original board game inspirations, perhaps because they can provide that very sense of teamwork and community that is so lacking in existing “social” gaming.
With traditional unifying forces like violence-prone nationalism and patriotism becoming controversial topics in the rapidly globalizing modern world, we begin to lack powerful tools for bringing people together.
But here is the potential to unite under globalization, not through violence, but through gaming. Peaceful, enjoyable conflict that ties people together. As a pacifist and a gamer, I could ask for nothing more.
Tags: Arcade, Facebook, GoCrossCampus, google, Local Gaming, Multiplayer, Nintendo Wii, Online, Politics, Rock Band, Social Gaming, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Teamwork, Turf
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