Video game

Opinion | Are Video Games the Best New Social Network? – The New York Times


If you silence that feature, you can communicate via menus of “emotes” — gestures and poses that your avatar can perform with the press of a button. These range from enthusiastic high-fives to respectful salutes to goofy dances. They are often used in celebratory team bonding after a successful mission to topple a titan or locate and secure a magic gewgaw.

In The Division 2, another recent online shooter, players are actually rewarded for dancing together or performing emotes in synchronicity. There’s no larger point to the dancing; it doesn’t help complete missions or eliminate enemies. It doesn’t really make sense in the game’s world, a stunningly realistic near-future mock-up of a war-torn Washington.

These features exist in part because the fans demand them: Before Anthem’s release, its makers announced that they would include a “social hub” at the request of early gameplay testers. They also exist because designers have tried to encourage cultures of community and civility. Another recent multiplayer shooter, Apex Legends, allows players to communicate via a system of “pings” — voiceless, graphical commands that both break through language barriers and limit opportunities for in-game harassment.

Efforts like this don’t always work: A committed jerk can still find a way, especially on open voice chat. And as with other male-dominated online spaces, female players are more likely to be targets. But they make for a sharp contrast with the casual, unstructured cruelty that’s so common in other online spaces like Twitter.

The online space designation is especially true for something like Fortnite. Sure, it’s a “battle royale” game in which the object is to eliminate all the other players (or player squads) to become the last one standing — to really know a person, it sometimes seems to suggest, you have to kill them in a virtual world — but it is nonetheless a social experience, a virtual place to hang out and chat with friends and strangers as much as a competition. The game is organized by seasons that sometimes feature special events, like an in-game rocket launch, that serve the dual purpose of structuring changes in the game and community rituals.

For many devoted players, that’s what Fortnite is: a community, a virtual “third place,” the Starbucks of its day.

Or perhaps the next Facebook. As others have pointed out, Fortnite operates as much like a social network as a game; its biggest rival might be Instagram. Like social networks, these games combine distraction with communication; people chat about the game, yes, but also about their offline lives.



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