We’ve Changed
People act much differently online now, compared to the last 20 years. People have also gotten a lot better at video games, especially in multiplayer environments. It has been interesting to see it develop over the span of my personal gaming life, from interacting with others on Club Penguin and Roblox, to competing and collaborating in League of Legends, World of Warcraft and many more games. I’ve found this change in online social attitude to have mixed effects on the enjoyment and experience for a lot of titles that I’m fond of.
Toxicity is prominent in the online world, always has been. And although today’s toxicity is rather relentless, I feel it is much more tame compared to what people were saying to eachother before. Toxicity is very much still an issue, but with more effort into moderation nowadays, a lot of the really, REALLY crude and borderline-criminal comments are no longer being spread as much.
I feel like more people now also expect others to play at much higher level, and thus have a much more strict level of entry into their group events. A good example of this would be the behaviour of the World of Warcraft playerbase. Often people advertise in-game on a general forum for others to join their adventure to a difficult 10 to 25 man dungeon. In these advertisments they ask you to provide your “gear level”, or how good your armor and weapons are. However most of these players’ requested minimum “gear level” requirement is well over what is necessary for the respective content, and sometimes is much higher than what is even attainable from previous dungeons and other content that is available at that level. Essentially locking out new players from end-game content entirely.
This was never the case 13 years ago in the game. Perhaps it did happen to a reasonable extent, but people were much more social and relaxed as no one had really experienced gaming like this before, and there was a sense of relatability and kinship among players. I remember everyone being very friendly and understanding, even giving eachother tips and often offering a friendly hand. Nowadays, everyone expects you to know how everything works and will chuck a fit if you do anything wrong.
There are more games now that are specifically created as social games, where the prime directive is to hang out virtually and socialize with others. Games like these include: Tower Unite, Meadow, VR Chat.
It’s still possible to have a chat and giggle with someone random on your favorite online game, but specifically in MMOs and competitive games, I think it is much more rare to see.
None of this backed by any case study or scientific evidence, It’s just what I personally have noticed over time (so take all of this with a grain of salt). :)
