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.
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 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.
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.”
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.