Playing well with others
The myth of the lonely gamer is a lie.
Jeff Kaplan met his wife in his 20s, as many do. He was an aspiring writer living in Los Angeles while moonlighting as a Halfling rogue in the multiplayer fantasy video game “Everquest.” She was a Dark Elf warrior at the time, and, to prove himself worthy of joining her guild, Kaplan had to duel her with a set of serrated bone knives. It’s the usual, age-old story of love.
At first, they only knew each other by their screen names, and whatever could be gleaned through the clunky text chat programs of the 1990s. “For years, I thought she was a male,” Kaplan recalled.
They became close all the same, then met, then married. At the dawn of multiplayer video gaming, Kaplan and his wife understood what a Washington Post-University of Massachusetts Lowell poll just made abundantly clear three decades later: The myth of the lonely gamer is a lie.
Nearly three quarters of Americans
age 14 to 21 had played or watched an online multiplayer game in the last 12 months, when the poll was conducted last fall. The survey is among the first to gauge the growing popularity of e-gaming, and finds 25 percent of all adults played or watched games in the past year, peaking at 43 percent among those under age 40.
Over half of gamers age 14 to 21 considered friendship an essential part of playing, the poll found. And nearly half had made at least one friend through a game, be it in a “Call of Duty” arena or one of the countless online role-playing games that succeeded “Everquest.”
These friends may talk by text, like the Kaplans in the 1990s, or lately by voice — which has become a standard component in most online games — and video, through game streaming websites such as Twitch. Or they may meet in person, dragging an Xbox to a friend’s living room or crowding into a bar with hundreds of other gamers, like NFL fans on a football Sunday, to catch a match from the exploding esports scene.
The medium hardly matters. Many of these friendships deepen for years, until the bone knife duels and deathmatches that enabled them are nearly forgotten, and only bonds between people remains.
The Kaplans are still together. Jeff set aside his writing ambitions to help make multiplayer games. He worked on “World of Warcraft” and then as lead designer on Blizzard’s ultrapopular, team-based shooter, “Overwatch.” Both are largely designed around in-game friendships.
Multiplayer games are more popular than ever now, and what Kaplan and his wife knew in the 1990s is becoming something close to an industry motto:
“The most important story in a video game is between the people playing the game together,” Kaplan said.
Sharing time
The Post-UMass Lowell poll found a 54 percent majority of teen and young-adult gamers said enjoying time with friends is a major reason they play or watch games, far more than said they play to improve their skills or to have a chance at winning championships. A similar 52 percent of young gamers said they play or watch online games with friends they met offline, while 45 percent said they have become friends with people they connected with while playing games online.
None of this seems strange to Rebecca Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who studies and has written several books on the science of friendships.
Sociologists identified the fundamentals of friend-making decades before the internet existed, Adams said. Two people meet more or less accidentally, often because they both regularly visit the same places — a baseball field or coffee shop or office. They discover a few things in common, and a relationship develops naturally, in a setting they’d frequent regardless of the other party’s presence.
As the friendship deepens, it eventually transcends the place where it started, moving from the coffee shop to, say, dinner parties. Or from a fantasy dungeon to a voice chat program.
In some cases with video gaming, a deep friendship can form without ever moving off the screen. Pearl Lee, a 21-year-old college student on Long Island, New York, says she could never afford to travel overseas. Likewise,
her friend who stocks shelves in the United Kingdom could never afford to visit New York. And yet the pair have known each other for years — ever since they met on a dungeon raid in the role-playing game “Mabinogi.” Only Lee still plays that particular game, but she and her friend talk nearly every day through the voice app Discord.
“I don’t think this is such a new thing,” Adams said.
Theories of friendship
At Blizzard, Kaplan jokes that “game designers are amateur psychologists ... we spend a lot of time thinking about psychology and sociology with no degree in it.”
Nevertheless, his design philosophy sounds remarkably similar to the theories of friendship studied by Adams and her academic colleagues.
“Overwatch” features dozens of characters players can utilize while on teams with five other players, often randomly selected by the game.
“Overwatch” has no single-player story, because in a sense the players and the connections between them are the story, and the game mechanics are designed to encourage those relationships. Call of Duty’s latest iteration, “Call of Duty: WWII,” features a lobby where players can talk and show off their avatar’s latest accolades, uniforms and weaponry. The game even includes a social score, with special gear unlocked by higher scores.
NOTE: This Washington PostUMass Lowell poll was conducted Aug. 22-Sept. 8, 2017, among a sample of 522 teens and young adults on a probabilitydesign online panel with a margin of sampling error of +/- six percentage points. The adult sample was based on a telephone survey of 1,000 randomly selected adults conducted Aug. 14-21, 2017, with an error margin of +/3.7 points.
Contributing: Scott Clement, The Washington Post