There is a sense of community on the other side of the screen, which gamers have understood for a very long time, but that the public is only now beginning to understand.
In mid-March, my buddies made a joke about how "our whole lives have been leading up to this."
I was sitting in my cramped New York City apartment, feeling panicked and accepting the possibility that I would be stuck there for weeks or even months. But as lifelong fans of video games, my pals told me that the notion of lounging on a couch in front of a TV for an extended period of time would be simple. After all, gamers like me already spend a significant amount of time in front of screens.
However, despite spending hours alone, gamers aren't always lonely. Frequently, far from it. Gamers, especially those in Generation Z, have mastered the ability to create communities within and around video games thanks to the growth of social media. Gamers build real, enduring connections as well as rivalries with strangers online.
A tool that gamers have long had that is now providing some relief to individuals who have never picked up a controller before is now available in this age of long-distance social isolation and mental-health pressures. The rapid expansion of gaming during the epidemic has demonstrated that many people have discovered a new means of connection during their time of isolation.
Millions of people all over the world used tech-fueled pastimes like Netflix Party movie viewings, Zoom chats, and video games to stay in touch with family and friends when shelter-in-place orders were lifted.
The space saboteur mobile game Among Us, which has been downloaded 100 million times, and the Jack box games, which combine video chatting and traditional games like Dictionary, have taken the place of actual happy hours. The most popular is presumably Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Players are dropped in a tiny tropical village full of chatty anthropomorphic animal neighbors who help them renovate their homes, capture butterflies, and plant fruit trees in Nintendo's March-released Switch game, which broke all previous records and increased the company's profits.
The popularity of gaming has increased dramatically since the outbreak, reaching people who previously avoided it totally or just sometimes played. According to a recent study by the American business-research firm NPD, four out of five customers in one survey in the US alone reported playing video games in the previous six months. Additionally, gaming sales are rising at a time when many other businesses are struggling.
Although the idea of socialization in a game may be novel to some, gamers have long used technology like this to form relationships online and remain in touch.
Professor Mark Griffiths at Nottingham Trent University has spent decades researching socialization in video games and has written about gaming friendships in the epidemic. He published a study in 2003 that revealed that for 11,000 participants of the online role-playing game Ever quest, interacting with other players was their favorite aspect of the game. According to him, the study provided a clear and early debunking of the myth that playing video games makes players antisocial and alone (even though those early pandemic memes jokingly played off those stereotypes). He looked at 912 players from 45 nations who played massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing games on average for about 22 hours per week in another study from 2007. He concluded that the online game environment was "extremely addictive."
According to him, 10% of survey respondents ended up dating people outside the game. The concept of playing a game to socialize is nothing new. In 2020, Griffiths claims that during lockdowns when there was little to do, "maybe they're gaming for the first time, and they realized this was an outlet you can naturally socialize in."
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