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.
I honestly never used open voice chats in games, but I do miss Barrens chat.
The social players all moved over to FFXIV
I usually am on voice chat with friends instead of in game with random people.
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.
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’m from the US. Some standouts where this occurred are battlefield, cod, counterstrike, and overwatch.
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.
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.”
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.
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…
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.
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 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.
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 think there’s a lot of evidence backing you up. The Blizzard reps always said on the forums that they took forum chatter into consideration but had actual game and player metrics as well, and that they weighed that higher
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.
The fundamental difference between then and now is that there is no limitation to be had from refusing to invest in social connection. You can get the gear, do the dungeons, finish the quests, all without establishing a reputation.
(A big footnote: you could be a total jerk and still have powerful connections. This wasn’t a “be good or else” culture, though people were mostly nice to each other.)
In many ways, the way things are now is better: you had some terrible addictive patterns emerge in the older version of the game. People were obsessed, and the obsession would pay off! You’d accomplish more, the more you invested.
It’s also sad, though. I miss my old crowds. They were good folks, and many of us made bonds that lasted. It’s a shame that this isn’t really something that happens anymore.
