popular between friends than the playing of video games.
Perhaps the most fundamental question of all here is how someone can be said to have ‘met’, let alone got to know or formed a friendship with, someone else when their relationship is entirely mediated through a screen. It’s a question that mystifies and concerns many people of the non-gaming generation, and that even among gamers largely lacks any fixed points of reference or means of critical evaluation. But it’s also an increasingly common, albeit implicit, assumption that the various virtual interactions in someone’s life – their emails, their electronic chats and texts, their phone calls, their blog posts and shared photographs, their Amazon wish list and Second Life avatar – are collectively at least as revealing of who they are as the conversations they have with colleagues across a desk or with friends across a restaurant table. The very notion of what social interaction means is shifting fundamentally.
According to one influential and wide-ranging study, the 2008 Pew Internet/MacArthur Report on Teens, Video Games and Civics in the US, the great majority of game-playing today is a shared experience of some kind. Surveying over 1,000 teenagers, the group of players whose behaviour is probably the best indicator of larger trends to come, the Pew Internet/MacArthur report said that 94 per cent of American teenage girls played video games, as did 99 per cent of teenage boys; and that, across both sexes, 76 per cent reported that they played with friends, either in person or online. These numbers have steadily increased over the last decade – similar surveys in 2001 and 2003 put the figure at just over 60 per cent – and, given that all the most rapidly growing sectors of the industry today are linked in some way to social gaming, are certain to keep growing.
The trend is predictable enough in that, like sports, the pleasures of most games are best sampled in company. Each game is a live, unfolding performance to which every player brings something slightly different – and during which the pleasures of discovery, skill and achievement are invariably enhanced by the presence of a sympathetic audience. This is especially true of the genre of games designed to be played by friends or family members gathered in a living room: various party games on the Nintendo Wii, or performance games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band where much of the joy is – as with board games or watching live sports – in the atmosphere of the room itself, rather than anything in particular that’s happening on the screen.
Still, perhaps the weightiest criticism of the impact of modern games derives from one fundamental point: that, in the majority of cases, the primary interaction is between a player and an unreal, onscreen realm. In contrast to unmediated face-to-face relations, the theory runs, these game-based interactions are inevitably diminished, and in turn diminish the things that flow from them, such as friendship, trust, commitment and affection. It’s an argument that has been put eloquently by, among others, the philosopher Roger Scruton, whose position, as articulated in a 2008 article for The Times , is as follows:
In real life, friendship involves risk. The reward is great: help in times of need, joy in times of celebration. But the cost is also great: self-sacrifice, accountability, the risk of embarrassment and anger, and the effort of winning another’s trust. Hence I can become friends with you only by seeking your company. I must attend to your words, gestures and body language, and win the trust of the person revealed in them, and this is risky business. I can avoid the risk and still obtain pleasure; but I will never obtain friendship or love.
When I relate to you through the screen there is a marked shift in emphasis. Now I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn you off … Of course I may stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it
Perhaps the most fundamental question of all here is how someone can be said to have ‘met’, let alone got to know or formed a friendship with, someone else when their relationship is entirely mediated through a screen. It’s a question that mystifies and concerns many people of the non-gaming generation, and that even among gamers largely lacks any fixed points of reference or means of critical evaluation. But it’s also an increasingly common, albeit implicit, assumption that the various virtual interactions in someone’s life – their emails, their electronic chats and texts, their phone calls, their blog posts and shared photographs, their Amazon wish list and Second Life avatar – are collectively at least as revealing of who they are as the conversations they have with colleagues across a desk or with friends across a restaurant table. The very notion of what social interaction means is shifting fundamentally.
According to one influential and wide-ranging study, the 2008 Pew Internet/MacArthur Report on Teens, Video Games and Civics in the US, the great majority of game-playing today is a shared experience of some kind. Surveying over 1,000 teenagers, the group of players whose behaviour is probably the best indicator of larger trends to come, the Pew Internet/MacArthur report said that 94 per cent of American teenage girls played video games, as did 99 per cent of teenage boys; and that, across both sexes, 76 per cent reported that they played with friends, either in person or online. These numbers have steadily increased over the last decade – similar surveys in 2001 and 2003 put the figure at just over 60 per cent – and, given that all the most rapidly growing sectors of the industry today are linked in some way to social gaming, are certain to keep growing.
The trend is predictable enough in that, like sports, the pleasures of most games are best sampled in company. Each game is a live, unfolding performance to which every player brings something slightly different – and during which the pleasures of discovery, skill and achievement are invariably enhanced by the presence of a sympathetic audience. This is especially true of the genre of games designed to be played by friends or family members gathered in a living room: various party games on the Nintendo Wii, or performance games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band where much of the joy is – as with board games or watching live sports – in the atmosphere of the room itself, rather than anything in particular that’s happening on the screen.
Still, perhaps the weightiest criticism of the impact of modern games derives from one fundamental point: that, in the majority of cases, the primary interaction is between a player and an unreal, onscreen realm. In contrast to unmediated face-to-face relations, the theory runs, these game-based interactions are inevitably diminished, and in turn diminish the things that flow from them, such as friendship, trust, commitment and affection. It’s an argument that has been put eloquently by, among others, the philosopher Roger Scruton, whose position, as articulated in a 2008 article for The Times , is as follows:
In real life, friendship involves risk. The reward is great: help in times of need, joy in times of celebration. But the cost is also great: self-sacrifice, accountability, the risk of embarrassment and anger, and the effort of winning another’s trust. Hence I can become friends with you only by seeking your company. I must attend to your words, gestures and body language, and win the trust of the person revealed in them, and this is risky business. I can avoid the risk and still obtain pleasure; but I will never obtain friendship or love.
When I relate to you through the screen there is a marked shift in emphasis. Now I have my finger on the button. At any moment I can turn you off … Of course I may stay glued to the screen. Nevertheless, it
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