This was pieced together from essays originally created in 2016 and 2019, this is updated in 2023.

I enjoy videogames, but I had a big gap in playing them from about 2010 until 2016. Moreover, I missed the Xbox 360 generation of multiplayer games in the late 2000s which many of my friends played. As a result, for a long time, gaming was a solo endeavor for me. I gravitated towards single-player, story-driven games (Portal, Arkham Asylum, Skyrim) and sometimes strategy games (Total War series, Civ V). And, of course, I tended to play these on a delay, waiting for Steam sales to reduce the cost of my infrequent hobby.

But in 2016 I decided to go for a multi-player game soon after it had come out: Overwatch. Blizzard took many of the excellent gameplay ideas in Team Fortress 2 genre, inserted their art and character backgrounds from their failed MMO Titan, and then created an amazingly fun and deep multi-player shooter.

Gaming Trends

In retrospect, I see Overwatch pushing two important trends in my gaming life, trends which might also generalize to others. Those trends are (A) social and (B) strategy. Overwatch was one of the first times I started playing with friends online. Sure, I had done so years ago at the height of World of Warcraft, but voice chat was often buggy and Discord didn't exist yet. Of course, since Overwatch, I've played lots of single-player games, but nonetheless this marked a real change in my approach to gaming where I started to really pay attention to games I could play with friends.

Next, competitive role-based multi-player gaming is extremely engaging, and this was my first real foray into it outside of WoW PvP. Trying to beat puzzles crafted by game designers is great too, but there’s something you can’t reproduce without battling against other people who are reacting to your tactics with their own counters. I always enjoyed player-vs-player parts of WoW, but part of it always came down to players who sank more time into the game got better weapons. Overwatch, like many other competitive shooters, doesn't lock better weapons or bonuses behind time-sinks. It's the same reason people are interested in sports or chess: competition is fascinating.

Overwatch's skill-based gameplay also beautifully combined many details apart from gameplay: the world was engaging and immaculately designed, the game wasn’t buggy at all, the point system was well crafted, the matching algorithms worked quickly and efficiently, and the community dialogue was amazingly transparent.

I also saw the development of these two trends in tabletop games that were starting to be important parts of my social life around the same time frame. In a vacuum, the rise of tabletop gaming is somewhat surprising given in a lot of ways, digital games are a lot better than physical games: the computer can keep track of all the numbers, the animations can be way cooler, and your pets can't accidentally knock over the entire board! But by their nature, board games are not about time devoted to the grind; they are about skill, strategy, and (sometimes) reading your opponents.

They are also social! They provide reasons for friends to get together in real life and provide a stimulating and fun activity. Going out is fun, but there is a different type of social benefit you get from board games. The challenge of developing mixed strategies and avoiding betrayal is a unique social experience you can't get at a bar or club.

Why are these changes happening now? I suspect part of it is social technology; the internet makes it easier to discuss on reddit what the best strategies for a videogame are, which means gamers are themselves better than they used to be, and in turn games must be more challenging to keep up. Possibly, the games that are able to stay ahead of the curve are ones where you are facing other players who are also adapting to the game in real time. And of course, technology allows more live player interaction than ever before as internet connections improve. Let's come back to that.

Another reason may be that we are a richer societies with more free time; if you're doing tons of manual agricultural labor every day, you might not be in the mood to play DnD after work, even if all the "technology" for DnD, like dice and paper, has been around for thousands of years. Additional free time mixed with better social technology to spread knowledge of games could be why we see games becoming a bigger deal. If we're moving towards a post-scarcity society, having more of our time spent socially playing games with friends isn't so bad. But it won't show up in GDP!

Technology Improvements

I know "Metaverse" has become corporate jargon speech, but it's worth discussing in context of the experience of modern gaming. In particular, let's talk about Deep Rock Galactic, a game I've been playing with my friends since 2018. Deep Rock is a cooperative first person shooter where players take on the roll of galaxy-fairing mining dwarves sent on dangerous missions on a hostile alien planet. The missions contain a variety of objectives and types of enemies, and allow for up to four players to play together.

Deep Rock seems to be the perfect game to play with friends. The gameplay is simple to learn: you shoot aliens and you mine rocks. But once you know the basics, you can start exploring the complexity of the game and stretch your creative muscles. Here the strategy and social aspects weave together an excellent world that you can spend hours in. There are multiple classes with different guns and creative abilities. They allow for grappling across levels, creating instant platforms on walls, permanent moving cables, or digging out tunnels through rock. More content is being added via seasons every few months even though this is now my 6th year of playing the game. Beyond weapons, there are special abilities, power-ups, and special mission modifiers that allow for a huge range of gameplay challenges.

There are also multiple types of alien bug creatures. Some are pretty standard enemies that run up and attack you. Others are suicide bombers that will stand next to you and detonate. If you know where they are coming from, you pick them off from a distance, but if you let them get close, you better call them out to your teammates who are busy mining rocks or trying to stop other bugs from eating their face off. There are also flying bugs, some that will try and pick you up and drop you far away from your teammates, ranged acid spitters, and giant armored beasts. Some bugs are even attached to shadowy cave ceilings waiting for you to drop under them, where they grab you and pull you helplessly away. Your only hope is for your teammates to blast the leach before you expire. These make for some hilariously chaotic battles.

The level design itself is beautiful even though every level is algorithmically generated. The mission types are quite varied; some require you to find and boot up old equipment and then ride it out before the bugs get you. Others require escorting a huge digging machine to a major mining objective and guarding it through successive waves. Each is a unique twist that (especially in higher levels) relies on specific tactical decisions your group makes to survive together.

The cooperative nature of the levels really makes the game for me. Putting up a good fight as aliens slowly surround you is tense, but when one of your teammates is suddenly picked up by a grabber and flown away, the panic starts to set in. There is intensity when making a daring run for one of your downed teammates, throwing up a temporary shield and reviving them while swarms of bad guys surround your bubble waiting for it to disappear. Another fun moment was at the end of a level where we had completed all the objectives, we now had to make it to the extraction rocket they sent. Somehow, the only way over to that part of the cave seemed to include narrow bridges of unavoidable enemies and it was taking too long to deal with them. It didn’t look like we could make it to the rocket before the level ended, meaning all of our work would be for nothing. With 90 seconds left, the digger thought he might be able to burrow straight through 60 or 70 meters or solid rock to get the chamber with the rocket, so we covered him, as tons of giant bugs tried to crawl into our tunnel while he slowly dug it out. We popped out right next to the rocket and got inside before time expired.

The Future of Presence

There is something special about this experience. You are sharing a world with your friends, but this world isn't physical. They are in your ears as you chat or freak out over Discord, they are on screen helping you to achieve your goals with healing or assistance, and you are all creating real memories that you will talk about later, but you remain possibly thousands of miles away.

And not just Deep Rock, although it's an outstanding example. During the pandemic I played a zombie crafting survival game called 7 Days to Die with my friends. One of my most memorable experiences occurred when our group set up base in an abandoned house, not realizing what a good base should be and also accidentally cranking the difficulty up really high without realizing it. The zombie onslaught that night was unrelenting and we were totally unprepared for it. While we did a pretty good job fighting off the horde, suddenly we noticed that many of the house's foundations were starting to be destroyed as we hadn't realized that was a real danger, and now our plan of retreating to the upper floors now appeared to be a very, very bad idea. The entire structure then came tumbling down and we were left in a pile of rubble and zombies. We still laugh about the debacle years later.

This shared experience and shared presence is fascinating and it makes sense to have a name for this new interaction. The "Metaverse" is the one that's taken hold so far, but whatever we call it, it's remarkable. Improving technology means social gatherings don't have to be in person any more. And this is wonderful! it means I don't lose friendships just because we no longer live in the same place. The continued development of advanced games and ability to get cheap next generation VR headsets means this sense of having fun together in a virtual world could be even easier soon. I know a lot of people are skeptical that doing things in VR could really catch on, but I think it's worth emphasizing that TODAY's games already create a shared virtual reality. The only question is how we will interact with it going forward.

I think adults need to look at cooperative videogames as a medium for social gatherings. Modern society, and the internet in particular, has created a somewhat isolating social landscape. Netflix and HBO and YouTube mean that we live in an golden age of television and creativity, but also that we don’t need to interact with others in person in order to experience it; it comes directly to our devices in our bedrooms or living rooms. Cooperative gaming can act as a virtual social room, placing you at least ear to ear with your friends as you share an interactive experience and challenge. When I play Deep Rock, I don’t think of the time spent as “entertainment”, I think of it as “social interaction”. Even though my friends are thousands of miles away, we are talking about life and hanging out. I see this as a fulfillment of what people thought the internet could be; a place to allow people to connect in ways they could not before.