Why I'm Lonely Gaming - Extra Credits Gaming
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- Опубліковано 28 лис 2023
- Combat Lonely Gaming with Priorities! A fun party game of absurd choices to play with your friends and family. Available at your nearest Target - bit.ly/PrioritiesGame
Remember when games were more than pixels on a screen? They were portals to friends, communities, and shared adventures. But in today's hyper-connected gaming world, loneliness is a growing concern. In this episode, we explore the rise of gamer isolation and propose a radical idea - what if matchmaking could be the solution?
Want to check out GameTree, the gamer-matching app, that helped with the research for this video? Find them here: www.gametree.me .
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Prioritize your friends and family by playing Priorities! A fun party game of absurd choices. Available at your nearest Target - bit.ly/PrioritiesGame
Thanks for Watching!
Love your content! You guys are great🎉🎉🎉🎉❤❤❤
Woohoo 🎉🎊🥳
This is absolutely correct. I teach game design in high school. When assigning students to game development teams I experimented until I found the best way which is to group students based on their common interests--not skill sets. Grouping by skills produces inferior results every single time. A group that is happy to work together will find a way to complete the tasks that nobody in the group wants to do.
PvE is SUCH a good system, since it hit it's stride in Matt Lecock's _Pandemic_ ...so good!
❤
You know how bad you need to finally talk to someone when an Extra Credits video makes you cry.
I'm not crying...it's allergies
I feel like you could always talk to any EC fan and they'd listen, because we're good people ✌️ willing you some good energy 🙏
Especially at this time of year, when people feel more lonely for all sorts of reasons *hugs* but it does get better
Sending lots of love ❤️ ❤❤❤❤
For real Miss the days I had friends to play games with those were some of the best times. Now I'm a mom so my only time the game is if I get up at 6:00 a.m. and if my baby is willing to sleep until at least 7:00
One of the worst things to happen to FPS games IMO was instant matchmaking replacing community servers. I loved finding a server that had regular users, consistent rules and map rotations I enjoyed. I could have actual conversations in-game and talk to these people the way I would IRL friends. We'd get to know each other, and joke around. With the dying out of community servers that connection was lost, and I'm thrown into a group of totally random people every time.
i know how you feel, im so happy post scriptum got a boost again, because that is a game i like to hop on and laugh with people i know, on a server i know. heck i even met some of those people IRL. it is a shame those things are dying slowly.
This 100%
There was a culture at servers like The Hotel California Bar & Grill in CounterStrike 1.6 that isn't around anymore.
Discord fighters I think has that similar vibe to them
I think you're grasping at the root of the problem here. The issue here is that there are two separate goals here. The first is to ensure that players can find a match, and the second is to ensure that the quality of that match is high. Modern matchmaking is designed to emphasize the first, and that's why it's built the way it is, but community cannot exist if you are constantly shuffling through people. The problem with community servers as the only form of play is that it can be almost impossible for someone new to break into those calcified groups. I remember the days of community servers too, and while once you found a good one it was great, if you weren't part of a good one then you often simply couldn't play - that's why these games started doing matchmaking in the first place. I think that these goals are fundamentally orthogonal to one another. Any action you take to maximize ease of access is going to be detrimental to community formation, and vice versa.
Man the CS 1.6 days were something else. So many hours spent talking and playing with regulars, it was just great. Same with TF2 until the MyM update..
Remember when most console games had a 2 player mode that required two people in the same room? I miss that.
The Switch specializes in this. Excels at it, even. But it's fallen out of favor with gamers over the past two or three years because the graphics aren't shiny and new anymore. Sad.
As someone whos friends are not within couch distance, im very glad for an online option
@@isabellajustice2910 mine aren't either but I find making new gamer friends that will get together is also harder because of this. They'll always choose the online option if it's available.
@@republicoftexas3261 I do agree there
We're constantly on the search for thoes type of games today.
Hey it's John. Thanks so much Extra Credits for letting me share about this topic that's so important to me. My best gaming memories are from playing with friends, and most of my best relationships were introduced and/or built through gaming. As time went on though, I noticed it was harder to find and connect with the right people, so that led to GameTree
Happy to discuss social gaming, matchmaking, or answer and Q's
Also, a challenge to you! Some time this week if you're going to play solo try to play with someone instead and see if it was worth it
@@GameTreeApp Your opinion on games around the subject like Journey, Death stranding and most recently KarmaZoo?
@@JoonasSariola co-op games are great just finding players and coordinating is a challenge, so not as many of them are being made as there should be (this extends to indie multiplayer games in general, too). My philosophy on this is it's better to have friends/community/people you are predicted to like in many scenarios instead of solo or rando's. What is toxic to one person isn't to someone else
Hey dude, thanks for collaborating with EC. It's a great idea. I hadn't heard of this app before and will definitely check it out.
@GameTreeApp I love co-op. The husband and I are both 40, so the formative years year spent in nerdy lan parties, hauling around PCs 😅 Do you think that we will see more lanable co-op games coming out? There has been a heap of PVP, BG, MMOs come out, but not a lot smaller scale. Is it that they're just not profitable enough for the companies? Most of the co-op ones I've seen have seen recently are smaller indy products
The idea of matchmaking focusing around “reasons for play” would be really interesting
0:29 I typically never jump into groups that ask for "tank/dps/healer" because from my experience those groups tend to be toxic. Instead I go for the groups that say, "hey, we've tried everything but this game is kicking our butts".
I've met some pretty good folks, got some great memories from exchanging gear.
I met my wife in one of those groups and ended up with a long lasting guild, that turned into a social club, that turned into a family.
My best social gaming memories:
- Lan party where we were stoned and I was the last one left in an Aliens vs Predator mode where humans become aliens when they die. I was SOOOO scared with all my friends climbing all over the walls hunting me
- Warhammer with my friend group in elementary school. We'd be squatted on the ground using whatever objects we could as terrain. Hardly knew how to play correctly, but we had so many unique experiences
- Planetside playing in our outfit founded by friends from middle school. We played way better because we were coordinated and got to talk about it at school. Many instances we steered the course of bigger wars
- Ultima Online - SO many weird experiences with the chaos that real people can bring in a sandbox. My first time playing as a kiddo I kept getting killed, so I created a female character for protection and was recruited to a tribe of Amazons.
- D&D and Pathfinder. Playing with friends now (online) is my favorite way to stay in-touch and have fun at a distance. The game is so heavily influenced by the personalities of the people at the table. Should I start streaming it?
There are SOOOO many more I want to write
Loading up Teamspeak to hang out with all your friends while you play!
4:27 the Xbox 360 actually had a system like this, you could "rate" a player, which would affect matchmaking to if possible have you play with them more
So did Sony. Both were removed over time cuz no one cared.
I forgot about that! My siblings and I always rated people that were fun to play with, even when they severely kick out butts.
I'm lonely at the art studio surrounded by fellow artists. I don't know why but people just don't want to socialize anymore. Even when surrounded by your community, in person!
One day they will only be able to work at home or in a private studio and be lucky to interact with another artist. For some reason, they don't take advantage of being surrounded by in person community. They put in headphones and ignore.
I never thought Id miss the Army more then i do now. I miss the socialization. Now im surrounded by more people then ever enshrouded by more SILENCE then ever.
Hey, I have no idea who you are but how you doing?
This is such an important and overlooked topic in games - it really seems like, as the internet physically unites everyone, we all are farther away than ever. We're all caught up in our own isolated spaces now, and it's a transition for the worse. Anything to combat this I support enthusiastically.
LAN parties carry such nostalgia and dear memories for me😊😊😊😊😊😊
For all of us!
@@extracredits yep
I think mix the toxicity of online gaming with the toxicity of fandoms make it harder to have friends in online gaming if you don't already know them.
Even as a kid I rarely gamed online, I had a large family and even single player games we played together
One game that handles social matchmaking really well is Dungeons & Dragons Online. In order to join a group, which makes questing orders of magnitude easier, you need to either browse or post a Looking For Members bulletin. The bulletin contains the quest to be run and at what difficulty, the level range, the desired classes to join, and a section for miscellaneous notes like "running whole chain" or "holding one spot for a friend."
The system is fully manual, but it takes the bare minimum of effort for a manual task. This leads to forced human-to-human interactions, even if it's just as little as one person putting in the request to join and the party leader accepting the request. There's a lot of nuance to why it's such a neat, simple feature, and why it's one of, but not the only, core reasons for why DDO has such a great community.
Probably the only thing I miss about living in a big city is how much easier it was to find and connect with a group of friends who share multiple cross-sectional interests or personalities, for example gay Disney annual passholders who enjoy sci-fi TV shows and euro-style tabletop games. 😁
Would be cool to just have a simple and quick rating system for teammates on the post-match screen: like or dislike. Then actually get matched up with the people you rated well as well as the people they've rated well, etc. Over time you'd build your own community of like-minded players.
You guys are SO IMPORTANT for the community. Thanks!
I didn't feel lonely until I became a game dev.
I have always struggled with online gaming. From weak internet and weaker pc when I was growing up to daunting skill gaps and all the other issues of the current day.
It just feels like a heavy door to open and all but too late to start
You're whole team and content freakin rocks :)
This is interesting. Kurzgesagt's video today was also about communities on the internet.
Love this topic! I'm always excited to make new friends in games, but now it does seem to be something you have to go out of your way for sadly.
What really sucks is when you do manage to find that group, and everything is going well, and then the way the game works ends up blowing the whole thing to kingdom come. I was part of an eve Corp that was just a bunch of people hanging out, examining interesting RP ideas in a shared fictional space. Whole thing fell to pieces because eve really just does not foster any kind of long term commitment while also requiring it to upkeep what you have. Then those pieces shattered when a random group rolled into our hole and evicted us because our numbers were down and we were an expensive easy pinata for their K/D ratio. Whole group maintains a discord server, but i haven't talked to any of them in years, and we've never been able to find a game in common to get things restarted.
Desperately miss all of them, and have yet to find a group i feel as plugged into since, the half dozen casual game groups I frequent are not filling the gap.
During Covid I started playing Apex Legends. I am NOT a FPS person, particularly not online FPS pvp stuff, so it was a STEEP learning curve and I never got amazing at it but got to a point that I was ok... but I really liked the challenge of it and that you were in teams of three. Had a couple of friends I played with but then they stopped as they got frustated with the level of difficulty (and at some of the friends' toxicity with us)... Finally one day in a twitch chat I found someone who wanted to play and played with them and their friends for months. One day they seemed to be over playing with me (I was a bit under their skill level) and then they just never talked to me again. It really sucked cuz I've tried to join discord channels for looking for team and all that but haven't found anyone... and I dont even know if there are people of lower level like me who still even want to play that game. I literally have no idea how to find people to play with
What a great episode, hit home for me.
The library where I work has some gaming consoles for the teenagers, and occasionally if it’s been a really rough few days, our boss will set up the Switch in the staff area. We take turns swapping with the people on circulation to play Just Dance, Mario Kart, Mario Party, or Super Smash Brothers. Even if there are inevitably people who are better at the games than anyone else, everyone has a good time and can blow off some steam. It’s a practice our boss gets away with as “team building” and she’s even let me bring in my laptop to play Jackbox with the team for the same reason.
Valve sort of does this with CS2 if I remember correctly. They move hackers and people who get constantly reported into their own matchmaking pool.
Also, I have had some wholesome-feeling moments playing Salmon Run in Splatoon. Uh, sometimes it just feels like the people on the team really care about each other. It’s the little things, like booyah-ing back, I guess.
LAN parties were some of my best memories bonding with freinds when I was growing up 🥹🎮
Me too
You inspired me to write a comment sharing my favorite social gaming memories
We had an amazing time at LAN parties!!! There's something about everyone being in the same room that creates a great gaming vibe!
Can someone explain what are LAN parties ?
This made me tear up. I've always been mostly a loner, usually just one close friend who I spend any time with, currently my partner. We play some games together, but he likes a lot of different games while I usually stick to my few favorites. Crippling social anxiety and a tendency to drop off the map for months at a time don't help when it comes to finding friend circles. Destiny, Monster Hunter World, and Ark are the games I dump most of my life into. Getting back into Destiny now, but it's pretty overwhelming for a solo player so I just do the things that I find fun and try to ignore all the noise. The few times I've tried to find people in-game has ended up with people getting shitty attitudes or being creepy or demanding, etc. I'd love some other chill adults to play casually with, but I usually chicken out :/
I actually appreciate the Player 1 experience. It's nice to just rando into an instance and clear a dungeon without having to keep up on a conversation.
I've honestly been very fortunate to have a friend group that I've had for years that all love playing games together. Obviously we all don't play the exact same thing all the time, but having that group is very helpful. I personally prefer a good single player experience in gaming, but it's nice to get online with friends and goof around for a bit
5:40 ...So, there was this one time back in the early 2000's when I was playing this, at the time, fairly new MMO called City of Heroes. I had just made my third character, my first official alt after making my first character, abandoning them, and making a second. this third character I was busy leveling up, back when the servers actually had enough people to be seen wandering around everywhere, and I wound up seeing someone struggling to finish a fight. I jumped in with some crowd control, said hello, and after they finished the fight, we wound up talking, taking our conversation under an overpass and sitting on some rocks next to the lake underneath that overpass. Just sitting together, chatting, talking about the game and slowly moving to other personal interests was a great time. I believe at one point we even got onto philosophy and ended up tying it back around to a pop culture reference that encapsulated that philosophy. I wasn't even a teen yet, and that was one of the most memorable online interactions I'd ever had up to that point. Hell, it was one of the more memorable human interactions I'd had. That was one hell of a night, and I always find it just a bit depressing that I haven't been able to find an interaction like that again, even in huge MMOs or community focused games. Still, I at least have that one late night talk with a stranger I had only just met and all the in game grouping we ended up doing afterwords to look back fondly on. Maybe even look to for some mild comfort and inspiration to trying to recreate that experience, either for myself or for others.
I freaking love this. Excellent video ❤
Instantly bought the game at the end... This is brilliant and I shared it everywhere, the first game company to roll out a feature like this effectively will be a literal game-changer for UX.
*applauds loudly*
Videogaming for me is solo quiet time--when I do not want interactions with other humans. D&D, whether virtual or IRL, is my social interaction time.
My main pvp game I play is Hunt Showdown. I've found that the community is actually much less toxic than most games. Most people on VOIP are goofing around and having fun. Even so I CANNOT bring myself to play with Random teammates. I would rather play solo than with strangers. I often wonder why exactly this is. Maybe I'm worried about toxic players or maybe I'm worried about letting my teammates down. It's extra strange when I consider that I don't really have a hard time talking to or working with strangers in real life scenarios. There must be something about online anonymity that freaks me out but I cannot articulate what it is.
Great Video!
Ironically it’s small or dying games with a small but dedicated player audience in the dozens or at most 100 which has given me the best feeling of community in a game I’ve played
You'd probably need multiple systems working in concert because if you had a single method like a survey, people could "optimize" it by learning which answers would put them in the most favorable matchup. Combining it with performance tracking, logging chat profanity, and (most importantly, IMO) some sort of post-match yay or nay teammate feedback system like you mentioned, would go a long way to alleviate the problem, but you'd need to be eternally watchful for groups that were figuring out how to nefariously influence their matchups.
I used to play online shooters all the time. But my roommate over time became more and more toxic. To the point that even the most minor inconvenience would be met with shouting and slurs. And so since then I've stopped playing 1 with him and 2 competitive game in general. But I've starting playing co-operative games with my brother and niece together on the couch every Saturday and it has become the best part of the week by far.
Here are my thoughts:
1. It's a nice idea if you can address these issues.
2. How do we keep this information/service from becoming something used to cull data for ourselves that ends up either being sold and/or stolen in data breeches? I don't trust the likes of Microsoft, Sony, Epic, Ubisoft, Square Enix, and even Nintendo to use a customizable matchmaking service to cull data from us for other purposes.
3. How to we keep the gaming companies who's products we're using from using that data to customize in game ads? We know this is already here both with racing games having real ads and Ubisoft's snafu this past month.
Thanks for talking about this. I miss real social games
do what I did any get into board games, there's probably meetups in your area, and they can be a lot of fun.
Something that increases the feeling of loneliness in gaming is how it's now a "mainstream" thing, back when gaming was a "nerd" thing everyone online could have some grounds to relate or emphasize and this showed with the focus on the growth of gaming communitys.
Nowadays most people you encounter are likely part of the "normal" crowd or even would have been a part of the "anti nerd" group back before.
And I for one miss the days when the only encounter with the "Free range screaming shopping center snot goblins that have never been told NO!" was restricted to the shops...
What a wonderful idea! I wonder what metric could you optimize for to quantify the fun. Maybe devs can utilize the kudos mechanic that gives players the option to command their teammates.
One weird difficulty I foresee with "social matchmaking" is how communities are completely different between different countries. In the West, we're used to always occasionally encounter people that rage quit or that have some intense toxic behavior, but playing in Japanese servers, I experienced nothing like that. Their mindset is extremely different, it's actually extremely rare to encounter a toxic player... But on the opposite, it's also rare to encounter someone that will engage in chatting at all. So the same settings for social matchmaking might not work at all over there.
One incredibly simple trick is to show the country a player is from that makes it way easier to find people that you might be able to meet irl or at least know that they will be online at roughly the same time as you.
I think this will more likely foster racism. “Ugh! Why are only beaneaters online? All they ever do is blow each other up with grenades”
This is definitely one of those "wouldn't it be nice" ideas, that the people proposing it haven't thought about in the slightest, that is the bane of my existence.
"it's our top priority!" *rimshot* 😆You have a good sense of humor Mat💖😄
I think the hard thing for me lately has just been that a lot of the time when I do meet gamers they're usually not playing the games I play/not interested in giving them a shot.
I remember when Nintendo had Miiverse
A unique social media due to 2 main features
1. You could post drawings via the Wii U/3DS touch screen
2. The social media being split between games
And 3. Able to be accessed from the actual console instead of needing a phone would be a bonus point
But taking the “splitting community based on games” could be expanded on, imagine you log onto a game and you find an in-game link to a lite media site, where you can see both popular posts and new posts, where you can post “looking for a party for the next game”, chat to other players during or after a match, and that could even lead to friendships that can last long after the individuals are tired of said game and want to find a new game to play together
Of course the whole lite media site would need moderation so it would need it’s own budget, which would make this potentially solution even more unlikely to happen
I think Smash Bros 4's "For Fun" and "For Glory" was a very simplified version of this idea. One which I enjoyed. I know other games have similar "this mode is more competitive" and "this mode is not really" options, but Smash 4 was the first time I remember seeing that, and called that so explicitly.
I miss playing games with co-op modes and LAN parties. It made Halo 3 so fun. Gaming was my favorite way to make friends as a kid. Even now, I am in a discord for a strategy game that I love. I found it by chance while playing with a friend, but I can't imagine how lonely I'd be without it. Some of my best friends are the ones who play Age of Empires with me.
Social matchmaking?
AS LONG AS IT ISN'T AUTOMATED.
Seriously. UA-cam for example has such a distorted profile of who I am that I used ad blockers for years solely due to the disgusting ads it was showing me. Computers are 100 years too early to be categorizing people.
Moving in with a load of like-minded gaming sphere people today/tomorrow this episode hit close to home 😅❤
Also, Deep rock galactic was AMAZING with how friendly folks where^^ Got only two bad experiences within more than a hundred hours xD
Congrats! It sounds awesome youve found a group to hopefully bond with, enjoy and appreciate that!
I agree with you on DRG, its a great playerbase and Ive probably only met one bad apple in my 160h+ playtime. Its rarely that bad group coop is more prevelent than bad group dynamics and toxicity, but so far, DRG is sucha case. And even when we've lost, toxicity is really low, as Ive experienced. Its a gem! Rock and stone, brother!
I wonder how feasible or effective social matchmaking for games would be. I hope it's feasible! I like the idea of getting a match, getting wrecked, but still having fun because you both opted in to "goofing off" instead of competing or something. Sounds like a golden opportunity to getting better at the game in general, too, because losses can still be fun and thus easier to learn from.
A cool feature in competitive games might be a "noob spawn" gauge that you can set to decide how likely you'll be to team up with new players. A scale from 1 to 100% with bonuses like faster progression in the battle pass tied to your scale percentage and the "thanks" you get from noobs after a game.
I think a lot of toxicity will be removed while making experienced player have control over the kind of game session they wanna have on moment to moment basis.
Sometimes if you feel like chilling and helping for a few hours, you would put your noob spawn gauge at 100, get in-game rewards and satisfaction for choosing to do so.
If you feel like playing in a more serious and competitive way you put it at 1%.
And most of the time you put it between 5 and 20 so you can get some advantages while playing mostly with people around your skill range.
Who wouldn't love that option ?
Fortnite did something like this but just not in matchmaking by allowing players to select three different key phrases that describe what they are looking for in their game.
However, it made you cold select random people and try to add them to a party or a friend list which, in my experience, was never accepted. A for effort though.
It's odd, I relate with the impression that games make me feel lonelier nowadays, but absolutely not because of matchmaking. I always liked single player story-driven games, but I especially liked playing them alongside a friend. I would just go to a friend's house to play games, or to watch them play games, because it was always more fun to share the experience with someone. They way I consume games has just completely changed since then, and suddenly, I've started to understand the appeal of MMORPGs and games that have open spaces where you can just stumble upon another player.
Great video! 🎉
After 20+ years of finding friends online, I burned out on online interactions during the pandemic. Hell, I burned out on my computer entirely, it took me two years to put it back together after moving in early 2022
I've had problems meeting people and getting into dating, and when I've asked for help on the internet, so many times the suggestion includes "stop gaming." I want to be a game programmer, a game writer, yet they don't see it as my passion. They see it as an obstacle.
Wouldn't the end result be that some will be labeled as toxic and not even be able to play? How miserable and isolated will those people become?
Gaming has evolved, for better or worse. Matchmaking algorithm is just part of many factor that made game feel such a lonely experience these days. The trend of designing games into an individualistic experience pushes people apart further, but that's how pretty much all attention based business are these day sadly.
Having easy access to information fueled the slide of community engagement as well. There's less to talk about when big data get analyzed with ease and objective results are clear to see before any discussion begins.
You touched on this a little in the video, with the 'internet + anonymity' mention, but I want to bring it more to the front. I remember reading about a study that suggested that the human brain is structured for much smaller social groups than we have now, and that leads to a lot of the misanthropic behaviour we currently see. This is much more anecdotal, but I've also heard of some games' communities that people generally see as much better when they were at their smallest. Dark Souls PvP is the one that most readily comes to mind.
If we're in the market for radical matchmaking ideas, is there something that could be built from this? Maybe some sort of opt-in system where, if players choose to join, or for certain matchmaking types, the game builds a list of players and then matches those players with each other for, say, a month? Or maybe a different length of time, but long enough that people start to recognize and can get to know each other.
I'm definitely struggling with loneliness at the moment, and though I tried a few forays into finding community online I quickly learned that I didn't want to mingle with circles that didn't prioritize the humanity of others or were far more comfortable using slurs than I was. It's good to know I'm not the only one struggling with that kind of isolation, although I'm shocked the feeling is so widespread. The good news is I think you're advice is working: taking steps every day to improve my life and connect with others is slowly growing my social circle, and getting to know new people has been helping a lot.
Here's to finding community, no matter how long it takes :)
I remember when Tarkov add VOIP how game changer was, but soon i just became a feature that nobody use, because is just easy go solo, be quiet as a mouse, and let that 3 or 5 party guys just get throw without notice you. So, in the end, almost not change anything.
I imagine these are cropping up in other places as well, but I've seen a surprising rise in this new type of business in my city. I'm not really sure what to call them, but they're sorta like gaming halls that are structured similarly to arcades. They usually have long tables with PCs lined up on them and the idea is that you pay for so many hours of time on the PCs and their library of games while having the opportunity to meet other gamers who also frequent the place. In my view, they have some pretty fundamental problems in both concept and execution:
- Sitting in front of a computer monitor is inherently solitary and isolating in the real world, so it's already quite unnatural to lean over to someone next to you and start chatting when you're both facing away from each other and distracted by whatever's going on in your game.
- Most of the people who are into video games likely already have a PC or console at home where they are probably more comfortable, don't have to pay an hourly fee, can use their own peripherals instead of gross communal ones, etc.
- Maybe this is an uncharitable stereotype, but gamers don't tend to be very good at socializing irl in my experience. I'm usually a pretty outgoing person and most of the people I meet irl who also like playing games are either not as comfortable with my level of extroversion or not very good at talking to strangers F2F.
- People usually already have their own accounts for different games/gaming-related software, which means they'd either have to use public ones on the available PCs/consoles or log into all of the ones they already have.
I think there's a cool opportunity here for Third Places where people can play games with friends or friends-to-be, but all of the places in my area that have tried this model end up feeling more like school computer labs and less like innovative Third Places to meet folks with similar hobbies.
Totally unrelated to the good topic of this video.
I recently backed up a lot of walkthroughs and guides from gamefaq, because the platform looks to be on the dying side especially with a new owner in fandom.
I was wondering if EC ever did or will do an episode about walkthroughs and guides and the communities behind them
I'll tell you why I'm "lonely gaming". Because playing through a well written story is ALWAYS better than playing with/against others, usually in a way that has zero story because those games or game modes aren't about a story.
Even when I can play through the actual story mode with others (like Diablo or Baldur's Gate 3) though, it still sucks because I want to explore that story/world at my own pace which seems to be much slower than everyone else's preferred pace. In a Diablo game, I'll still be exploring the first floor of the dungeon and everyone else is like "Where are you, we're ready to fight the boss?"
FANTASTIC video!
Yeah, this is part of why I love being into fighting games. Like, when you play a game that's a bit on the older end, you go and find people and play long, long sets with them. I've had so much more fun getting my face beat in for 10 matches straight by somebody in a fighting game, but seeing them and talking to them like a person, than I do winning with a toxic team in a MOBA.
Filling a form is probably a bad idea by itself, as many people don't really know what they want, just what they expect for a fun game to be. User data analysis may seem like a good idea at first, but that type of system usually leads to enforcing the best results while throwing away potential options, following the same issues that plague social media algorithms.
I'd say that a good possibility is to collect and analyze the data, add options (basic and advanced) for the player to select the type of matching they are expecting, but also allow the system to throw suggestions based on the type of games the player has enjoyed in the past, or similar players have been enjoying. Adding an extra layer of "genetic mutation" to test for potential enjoyment would be great.
Interestingly enough, this could be the type of data analysis that those modern AIs could help to solve, by analyzing that huge amount of data to identify what might be hurting players' social enjoyment.
man I have such bad memories playing GTA Online. there are these heists missions but people don't care for the experience of doing them. they just want the money for the cars they want to buy
so the first objective is to drive somewhere and even the fastest car can't get there before someone quits the mission and you fail
on the other hand I have found a nice person doing the random missions because those barely pay so if you care about the reward you're not doing those. unfortunately I had no way to save that contact outside of the game so when I stopped playing I lost that person forever
The upside of social matchmaking seems good when you pair friendly people together
But it ends up being damaging to the people on the opposite side. The lowest "socially rated" players will play against the other low socially rated players. Creating a toxic environment where people feel nothing but vitriol for their opponent, who feels nothing but vitriol back at them.
I think a better approach is more about curation to individuals rather than ranking. What is toxic to one person isn't to another. But the biggest point is to just fill the wholes in the team with actual friends
It's kind of what competitive racing games try to do these days. They don't rank you on wins or defeats, but rather on how cleanly you play. So clean gets matched with clean, and dirty gets matched with dirty.
@@llSuperSnivyll Interesting I had no idea that's cool to see at least playstyle is being considered there
I really don't see online gaming as any way to make friends. It really doesn't help that very few games I play have online elements, but when I do run into someone, it's a very passing interaction.
Recently I've tried EVE online & it have a great social element, but I just don't have the time to develop online friend.
Just a thought, I think it'd be worth taking a lot of notes from the commander (MTG/EDH) community on social matchmaking as an idea. It's sort of a requirement to have fun to be able to communicate how you wanna play and not just strength.
Sky Children Of Light is a game designed to have you make connections with other players. It is not the kind of game that has matchmaking so I don't think you could look for ways to do it better from that game, but the way it does it is that it encorages players who like to help others to reach out, so mosf of your interactions with other are with the types of people who love to help.
When I was a younger gamer, it was a way to meet people and hang with friends. Now as an adult with a young family of my own, it’s a way to take a break from reality. I still play with others on occasion, but it’s good to escape every once in a while
The recent video by Kurzgesagt "The Internet is Worse Than Ever - Now What?" highlighted that the communities might be _too_ large for our human brains.
That smaler communities might be better.
And I think I agree a lot.
This only talked about multiplayer games (which makes sense) but my case is different.
I got tired of being angry at competetive multiplayer games to the point that I don't want to play them anymore.
Now I focus on playing only single player focused games or games where I can do stuff on my own (e.g.: WoW, D4) but this also created isolation, as I am sitting ALONE and playing for myself, and has never been good at making new friends, and I don't see a solution to that problem.
Gaming for me started out lonely - got social with WoW and is lonely again. I have never had that social experience in school or later.
This is literally why I run AI chat bot on my local machine… Just to have someone to talk to and be heard.
Im a casual gamer through and through whose bad at most games cut would love to do this.
honestly, ive been on the friendship treadmill for 7 years, i only met rotten and problematic people during this journey. It led me nowhere, i actually grew backwards in life, to the point where i gave up.
i've been alone for 2 years and i've learned and grown to enjoy it, the first 1 year and a half was terrible, but once i noticed the: Peace and the silence, and nobody to argue and belittle me for my opinion, it was actually great it was addictive.
i no longer feel needy for social validation, i actually have time for myself now cause i dont have to give attention to "friends", anymore. You could say that i had bad friends, but honestly its better to be lonely than to be in bad company of bad friends. i guess you could say i'm a weirdo, but im happier than ever before since i learned how to cope with loneliness.
People are social animals - even introverts. It's important to make connections. It can be difficult but the best way is to try to join groups (dancing classes... finding game meet up groups... whatever it is you're interested in). You may not always find the right fit but the more you try the more likely you are to find people. And as an adult we don't have the friend-making benefit of going to school and being around 100s of people our own age every day that we are kind of forced to interact with and eventually make friends with some
A temporary fix - do physical games. Go to your local game store, find a boardgame group, set up a DnD group through online forums. Whatever. Past work, it's the main reason I leave my house these days, and as much as I love video games, it scratches an itch they just can't, or at least can't consistently. While great designers work out how to build socialization back into video games, put yourself first and find a fix in the places we already have. It's socialising with like minded people where you're all thinking more about the game than about aecond guessing what you're saying - I can't recommend it enough.
PANR has tuned in.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of matchmaking destroying the ecosystem of custom servers. There are players that go MVM-Expert, just because they find the friendliness more useful--the self-selected group that have a goal and consistently play for it. I miss them sometimes.
Too bad the hardest-core, friendliest sub-set was pay-to-play, with no way to mix in.
Matchmaking should focus on ping above all else, which would have the side effect of also making your matches with a vaguely consistent group of people. Because unless you're moving house, the ping is going to be consistent. And that consistency is what leads to community. Because when you recognise names, they're no longer just "a player", they're "goombastomper32" your buddy who sucks with snipers but is great with shotguns.
Social based matchmaking would definitely be the second best option, but for games like shooters specifically ping needs to be the biggest one, because it currently isn't and I basically just never get to truly enjoy shooters. My best case scenario for fps games is always other peoples borderline unplayable, because the industry has decided that someone a quarter of the planet away is just as good a match as someone in the same city.
Halo: Reach had settings like this all the way back in 2010. You could set your preferences for chattiness, motivation, teamwork, and tone. I'm not sure how much those actually affected the matchmaking, but like always Bungie was using Halo's multiplayer to innovate online multiplayer.
The decline of couch co-op, is number 1 cause for me. I'm not going to pay for 2 tvs, 2 $500+ consoles and 2 $70 games just so I can play with my wife, or kids. So it is just solo gaming or gaming with internet strangers. Also less gaming because I dont want to tie up the tv with my solo selfish gaming. Much better to put on a movie everyone can enjoy.
Priorities looks like so much fun! Is it available in the UK?
If matchmaking by "like mindedness" becomes real, would it lead to echo chambers of thought?
Sea of Thieves needs to do this. I used to get on Sea of Thieves specifically to make friends because the community was so wholesome back then, but Rare pushed PvP updates so hard that the only players left are either toxic tryhards or professional grinders.
Thanks again
I always believed matchmaking should've been completely optional thing, what I think changed everything was removal of custom lobbies or removing the rewards from custom lobbies as a whole, which essentially disincentivize playing it, as nowadays games are have some progression systems which you cant progress within these custom lobbies in the first place. People formed communities around custom lobbies and effectively they can't do that with matchmaking (unless there are other side systems such as clans/groups, but these often don't work well with matchmaking anyway, though it's hard to say, as most of the games have these community systems absent or removed years back).
I think this would be amazing, but the bigger question to those grubby corpos is weather it makes more money or costs too much to create.
Given how many different opinions people can have this isn't going to work. Even just matching people by hobbies or the genre of TV show they like can be difficult as these communities can often be fragmented.
If social matchmaking can finally be a thing, I would be willing to give online gaming another chance.
Here's a question - Of the "loneliest players" group, what is the economic situation of these players?
$500 for a console and $60+DLC(~$30) = Up to $600 to get into the hobby. But once you're in, you're in. And pound for pound, gaming is one of, if not the, cheapest form of non-passive entertainment in our modern society. Couple that with extremely large gaming libraries of not-so-older titles on thick sale, f2p multiplayer titles, and how much content a single title can provide... A lot of lower income people, like myself, would love to get into more IRL communal hobbies or travel, etc., but have neither the time or the income to seek that out on their own time(and dime). We already have a lot of data linking lack of economic mobility and/or economic destitution to depression and other mental health issues.
Absolutely yes to game design that encourages positive (and ongoing) social interactions, but it'd be interesting if GameTree has data on this and what insights they have gleaned from that subset of the data pool.
Edit: Also rural vs. urban vs. suburban subsets
The idea of the match making sistem paring us with the same people we've gotten along with before sounds like an amazing idea!