Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.
From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.
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Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.
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From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.
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That was nice but early reddit days, before subreddits, were the best days of the Internet.