The Social Aspect of Online Multiplayer is Dead and Gamers are the Murderers

If you’re a gamer of a certain age range, you probably remember a time when you could hop in a multiplayer lobby and it would be bursting with life. It was like walking into a party of endless possibilities. Maybe you’d have a good time and never see anyone there ever again, maybe you’d hit it off and keep in touch or maybe you’d be miserable and leave early. It was a crap shoot each time but those lobbies were great, they were something special. People made friends for life. Go into a multiplayer lobby now though and what you’ll find is the abandoned ruins of an ancient civilization. One that was destroyed by its citizens and left to rot. An eternal monument for future generations to be reminded of all that is wrong with gaming. Gamers.

The entire purpose of multiplayer games is to play with other people, socialize and have fun together. When online gaming came into existence, it brought with it the promise of expanding the greatness that we already knew of in local multiplayer. Not only could you now play and chat with your friends without having to find the time to meet up in person but now you could have that same fun with people all over the world. Gamers could finally expand their circle and meet more like-minded individuals from the comfort of their homes. It no longer mattered if you were the only gamer at school or even in town because, with online gaming, every game’s player population became a potential friend. For a community that was seen as outcasts for so long, that was a beautiful thing. But like all beautiful things on this planet, humans corrupted it beyond recognition.

Multiplayer lobbies these days are barren wastelands. Nobody talks. Nobody uses text chat. You might as well be playing with bots. You used to be able to go into a multiplayer lobby and it would be filled with people chatting. Maybe not everyone, but there were always a few. Even people who didn’t talk still had their mics on. You couldn’t go an entire play session of Modern Warfare 2 without being subjected to at least one person’s bad taste in music. These were places to play games and meet people. If you didn’t want to, you could mute everybody and that was okay but people largely interacted with one another. Yes, there were toxic trash talkers who took things too far but it was easy to mute them and move on. It was a time filled with stories of people meeting through in-game lobbies and becoming friends for life. But slowly but surely, human nature got in the way of the good times. Slowly but surely, those toxic people who were easy to mute became too great in numbers and they caused everyone else to just not bother.

I’ve recently been playing Evil Dead the Game. It’s an asymmetrical multiplayer game that is for the most part very good, you can read my review here if you’d like but here’s a quick summary. You play either as a survivor character on a team of 4 or as a demon trying to kill them. There’s voice chat for the survivors but in my time with the game, no one has ever used it despite how important it is to coordinate with your teammates. The demon can’t communicate with the survivors at all. I’ve had a couple of really great matches as the demon and wanted there to be a way to communicate with the survivors that I thought they played well and thank them for the match. The game is crossplay so I can’t just send them messages on my system since they might be playing on something else. I went onto the game’s subreddit and pitched for an in-game way to send messages like GGs. I know people don’t like voice chat so I specified in my post that I would just like something akin to Rocket League where there are only specific phrases you can use. I thought it was a good idea and in my naive brain, I thought other players would think so too. After all, why wouldn’t players want more ways to send positivity? I was wrong.

I was met with nothing but comments telling me it was a terrible idea. They told me that it would just be used for so-called “salty” players to harass others. Even despite my idea explicitly stating it would just be pre-written messages that the devs put in that you just choose to send, I was told people would still somehow use the positive messages in a toxic way. That’s right, gamers these days are so weary of other gamers that they think “GG” might be a toxic message. They have no hope that a “GG” could be genuine and believe it would be sent only to mock players who performed badly in the game. I was shocked at this but I can’t say I blame them. A lot of them either came from Dead by Daylight or had heard the countless horror stories about that games community, infamously one of the most toxic in all of gaming. But even if I understand why they would think that way, it’s sad nonetheless.

We now live in an era of multiplayer gaming where socializing is all but dead. Gamers are so weary of other gamers that they won’t even risk the possibility of a positive interaction because they just don’t believe it will happen. There are of course exceptions to this. Sea of Thieves is a current multiplayer game that’s overflowing with the types of interactions that made online multiplayer so appealing, to begin with. While Microsoft’s pirate game is still full of its fair share of bad apples, it isn’t hard to find stories of people who played the game, encountered another ship, spoke with the crew, and had a good time with new people and maybe even become friends. But that’s rare to find in other online games.

Call of Duty lobbies, once the most bustling metropolis of social interaction in all of gaming are now graveyards. The only time you’ll hear other players talk in Overwatch is in competitive mode and it will most likely make you turn off voice chat immediately. Games like Destiny have you running around worlds populated by players more silent than GTA pedestrians. Even MMOs have become more solo-player friendly because they know that players don’t want to deal with other players.

Not all is lost, however. Many games have their subreddits and discords where players can LFG (Looking for Group) to meet up with players who want new people to play with. Microsoft even has this as a feature on its Xbox consoles, where you can find other people who want to play right from the system’s dashboard. It’s a feature I think Playstation should copy. But still, some of that old magic is lost. It’s great that you can set up your parameters for meeting new people to play with but there was something about the days where you would load up a game of Halo 3 and not know if you were gonna meet people you’d like, hated, or became BFFs with. That’s a magic that gamers will never experience again and the only ones to blame are gamers.