World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether. It used to be something of a faux pas to play without a microphone, but I honestly can’t remember the last time one of my fellow dwarves has beckoned me to join a voice channel.
This is part of a shift that can be felt across video game culture writ large. Even though some of the biggest franchises in the world—Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends—pit a server’s worth of players against one another in lethal combat, the softer interactions those places once fomented are on the decline. We are all in front of our computers, paradoxically together and separate, like ships passing in the night.
This is a difficult trend to prove empirically, but it certainly has been felt by lifelong gamers. There are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture. (One video, titled “Modern Gaming Is Becoming More and More Isolated,” has over 500,000 views.) A similar despondence has struck the domains of Reddit and GameFAQs, which have historically served as the premier watering holes for fans of the hobby. (“No one uses voice chat these days,” wrote one user. “People don’t chat in gaming anymore,” added another.) On a more macro level, about half of Americans are currently experiencing loneliness, particularly among millennials and Gen Z, who represent the industry’s primary consumers. All of this is evidence of a generation that has come to believe that a reliable source of intimacy—even if it’s down the scope of a sniper rifle—has gone awry. I would find it pathetic if I didn’t totally relate.
In the mid 2000’s you got used to the trash talking pretty quick. I didn’t mind it as a kid. But over time it got tiring. When xbox live introduced parties, we slowly stopped going into public chat. It was around the time the kinect launched when we stopped completely.
There was always somebody playing with it on rather than a mic, and you could hear their whole house. The crying kids, the dog barking, having arguments with their spouse. It was uncomfortable at best.
It’s a shame because I met some of my best friends online. Now, because of time zones and work schedules, I never get to talk to them anymore. They aren’t really the type to keep up a conversation unless you’re actively talking with them daily, so we kinda just drift. Adult life really messed up my life lol.
Most multiplayer games now seem to focus on matchmaking and your performance, there’s not much focus on community anymore.
Everyone just plays for the highest score and doesn’t care about hanging out on a community run server every night with the same group of people.
The lack of static servers and prevalence of random matchmaking has made multiplayer gaming so bad. At best nobody talks. At worst, the people talking are toxic as fuck. Who cares, right? Never gonna see these players ever again. Nobody accepts friend requests either anymore because 9 times out of 10, they only wanted to add you to talk shit.
And back when we had community hosted servers, evading a ban was so simple, change server or restart your dial-up connection to get a new IP and change nickname, yet it was incentive enough to behave, because people recognized you just through your text (voice chat was usually limited to clan games)
I think it’s community (and lack thereof). When you had to talk to others on your server only, sit in LFG and shout in Ironforge for a UBRS group, then all schlep to Blackrock Mountain, then spend an hour battling through the instance, that was a shared experience with players you’d see more or less often. Now, it’s get in a random queue, get teleported there, race behind some tank who can solo the whole thing, then everyone drops at the end before you can even say thanks.
I’ve had the opposite experiences with Deep Rock Galactic, I think mostly because there’s no enemy team, but I’ve also had good experiences with Deadlock (valves new moba). Of course there’s still toxic shitheads in Deadlock, but they are few. I think this is because of how bans work; you’ll still be able to play the game, but depending on why you were “banned” you won’t have certain features. Like if you were reported for abusive text or voice chat, you won’t be able to use text or voice chat, only the in-game pings (which are pretty good IMO). Similar with other reports, but they aren’t exactly relevant.
Deadlock isn’t as bad but god, the amount of racist, bigoted, and straight up fucked up things people have said are tiring and enough for me to never want to be on a mic
There’s only so many times you bother listening to someone yelling at their teammates, throwing out slurs, or even telling people
CW
to get raped
Before you just start considering perma muting everyone
Interesting. Deadlock went straight in the “mega toxic comms” bin for me. Same experience as I had with DOTA.
Damn, I’m sorry about that. Some of my steam frens have said the same thing too. Idk what’s up with that. Maybe it’s my subtle, yet devastating comebacks: “Your depression doesn’t scare me” (they don’t know they’re depressed) and “Meow” (someone just called someone else a “Pussy”).
I’m also a big fan of the Mute button (which they recently added for the enemy team as well); it can make for an awkward game though, saving/healing someone that you muted. I haven’t used it recently though. >.>
DRG is in a class of its own for a cool playerbase.
I miss playing multiplayer games other than VRC. However, multiplayer games just aren’t fun anymore for the exact reasons you just laid out.
I don’t talk on mic, because as soon as I do, all the white folks, women included, start hurling racist shit in my direction. I’m definitely not interested in forming a community with that trash. Ultimately, though, I’m thankful that anonymity makes white folks comfortable enough to express their true selves. I’m never under any illusions that they can be trusted.
It truly is a shame that this behaviour is considered acceptable in many games. I still report racist comms, but it’s sometimes hard to manage as (a) it’s near impossible to report 5 people chanting n****r all at once (b) they rarely get banned when you do.
It is incredible to me how little imagination these people have, acting like primary school children who just learned a bad word and now use it all the time.
In the EU, it is primarily russians and americans who engage in this behaviour (as far as I can recognise the accents). A downside of the sanctions is that many games no longer have russian servers.
I would like to see some legislation that “encourages” large multiplayer game server operators to police their online environments properly.
It is incredible to me how little imagination these people have, acting like primary school children who just learned a bad word and now use it all the time.
Many of them are and dont understand the power or history of the word. And some just never mature past HS.
Where are you from that just speaking would be enough to know your race? Similarly, what are you playing where this occurs? Just curiosity since I’ve never experienced this (from either side).
I presume it’s due to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), there is a cultural aspect there that is detectable through voice
You’ve never heard of an accent?
An accent isn’t exactly a perfect indicator for race.
It’s not perfect, but it is an indicator. I mean if I heard someone talking with say a chinese accent I’d probably assume their race is asian.
It’s an indication of ethnicity which is good enough for racists.
I’m from the US. Some standouts where this occurred are battlefield, cod, counterstrike, and overwatch.
I usually am on voice chat with friends instead of in game with random people.
I honestly never used open voice chats in games, but I do miss Barrens chat.
The social players all moved over to FFXIV
While people might have moved there with the intention, it isn’t more ingrained in FFXIV than elsewhere. Arguably even less, because you can run nearly everything solo, including dungeons (there are NPCs to run it with you) and the story gates everything else and revolves around the player character.
If you think of the venue scene, they might be very social but they are often very toxic in that too.
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”
Back when I was actively playing Overwatch (this is now years ago) people were basically using the voice and text chat to be toxic shitheads to each other. At one point I decided that I didn’t need strangers telling me to kill myself in my life, so I ditched the game and generally just play single player games now.
Not sure how others have experienced it, but the community feeling of the past that the author is alluding to is gone. If it ever was there to begin with.
I stopped playing overwatch because I would play healer and then get abusive messages sent my way.
The breaking point was when I got one message demanding me to swap off mercy from one guy, and then a message from another teammate yelling at me for swapping off mercy. It was a really fun game at the time, but only with friends.
It was there for certain.
In WoW it disappeared when the Dungeon Finder was added, which made social interaction and therefore being nice to each other optional. Before that feature, you had to chat with people in order to form groups for clearing dungeons - a step that the Dungeon Finder conveniently allowed to skip…
Don’t get me wrong, the Dungeon Finder wasn’t the start of it, but it is what accelerated it greatly. Before that social interaction had already been in decline, mostly because everything except for the end-game had been slowly turning into essentially a single-player experience. However, everyone (who stuck to the game) sooner or later reached the end-game content, and had to interact with other players. With the Dungone Finder, this incentive was lost too…
(I am maybe a bit too harsh on the Dungeon Finder - some end-game content was difficult, so you had much higher chances of success if you played with a team you knew well - and therefore had to form/join a guild.)
It made dungeoning take less time. If it’s faster, it’s cheaper. Hazing endears the group to the new member. The inconvenience of hiking out to the dungeon after getting a group together, and reforming a group after someone left because the warlock couldn’t summon the tank in time to start the dungeon well before their dinner, was a shared trauma that helped the group cohese.
Old folks talk about how much better life was before tech. But it isn’t just old people. Survivors of war-torn towns and cities also come to look fondly upon their times of utter strife and starvation. The circumstances made every person much less disposable (or less cheap) and so people felt more valued. I remember a news story about someone finding graffiti in a city that was rebuilt after a war, the message translated as “Times were better, when they were worse.”
It was certainly there, but more common in cooperative games. Also, Overwatch is/was particularly infamous for its toxic community. While I didn’t play them myself, I’ve heard a lot of stories from competitive games back in the day where you could host your own lobby. Being a shithead back then could get you banned from any number of private communities, so you needed good behavior if you didn’t want to be an outcast.
My recollection is that what you describe became pervasive roughly concurrently with the rise of the original Xbox. I’m not pinning it to that device specifically, but it was during the time of the original xbox where I felt that voice chat in games transitioned from helpful collaboration to 99% toxic crap.
I rarely used it from that point forward, so maybe there was a later golden age I’m unaware of.
If your voice is higher pitched then you just get abused by players for sounding feminine or not manly. If you’re a woman, you’re lucky if you don’t get harassed. If you speak up for people being harassed, everyone will stop and gang up on you.
I no longer connect a mic to the computer I play online games on because it just isn’t worth it.
I’m a dnd fan, so ofc I played the MMO. Within the DND MMO, I had no harassment as a woman on a mic. In fact, it appeared as if ~50% of those playing and on mic were women. Granted, that was years ago. And maybe DND was, and is, a different scene.
Way back with vanilla and BC WOW, same though. No issues and lots of women playing. Self moderated social groupings, probably.
Granted, there was a social effect of 1 woman on a mic drawing out all the other women, a social permission & safety element.
No idea what it is now though, I’m too old for it now. If it’s rampant with harassment, that’s just sad, for everyone.
Gosh i wish i could experience what you’ve just described. I’ve never had that when gaming online. Sounds like a dream haha
Never played anything like call of duty, so idk, my experience is limited.
You would think, because we live in a society, it would just be cool like that.
Experienced it in Helldivers 2, rocket league, cs:go, Sea of Thieves…
This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.
The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.
There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.
For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.
It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.
Rose colored glasses. I played the hell out of WoW for years from first release and onward. Chat was chaos and if you got invited to someone’s vent server there were usually some jerks. Pseudoanonymity made people brazen.
I played a lot of competitive counter strike and it was the same. Constant trash talking or just nonsense spouting people. Any modern game I play with voice chat built in gets immediately disabled as soon as I start the game for the first time.
Socializing can happen later after a few (positive) interactions but I dont have the mental energy to deal with random folks when I just want to unwind with a game.
I don’t think it’s rose-tinted glasses really. I think it’s just the change in dynamic. It was definitely different during the “real” classic times (I would say classic to Wrath).
In 2005 when I started playing you needed to group up to get things done really. When you did this you met people. You talked, not with a microphone, but you would be talking. You’d get to know people, they’d invite you to dungeon groups and vice-versa, it would widen both of your in game circles and so on.
When I got to the position to raid, I was on an RP-PvP realm and while there were raiding guilds, many people were in smaller guilds that were either role-playing or guilds of friends. So, there were often raiding groups. I was in one of these, and we had our own guild chat-esque thing that everyone in the group could chat through and of course raids were mandatory voice. Because generally you did need to have communications to raid. This increased your in game circle too.
I still speak to some people now, on social media in various forms that I played the game with in 2005-2010. Some I met, others I never did. I’ve not really played retail much for a while now. But, it’s not the same. To an extent, neither is classic now.
Now, probably an unpopular opinion because I think a lot of people think Blizzard’s actions led to this change in community spirit. I actually think it’s the other way round. I think they saw their player-base changing, and adjusted the game to suit. The side effect is that it put off some of those with a more social gaming mindset for good. But, it would have happened anyway.
Times change, and they just rolled with it.
I still meet new people to play with whenever I start a new mmo. I started one just last week, asked for a guild on the recruit chat, joined their discord and played together for a while.
I guess it really just depends on what kind of game you’re playing and how old the game is. For games that have been going on for years, I doubt any guild would want to recruit people out of the public chat right away.
It really depends on what games you play. Some of my favorite games are so niche that ‘matchmaking’ simply consists of Discord pings. The upside of that is that you will get a very close-knit community out of it.
