The popularity of the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown reveals vistas of societal curiosity about how outsiders come to be revered as catalysts for collective social action. Yet, wherever a big celebrity story abides, the smaller everyday life realm appears. To that end, we might ponder a famous Dylan lyric within a 21st Century setting. “Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown.” This tune’s theme, that the cultural times are changing at an inexorably rapid pace and we best get on board lest we be left behind by the onrushing newness of the future, can serve to remind listeners today that the high speed Wifi realm may not be linked so much to fibre-optic cables and satellites as to a cultural state of mind. Modernity is all about breakneck change.
We social animals come together for a variety of reasons; often, if not always, it is due to words spoken by a catalyst person or group of people. Indeed, with a minor tweak (and perhaps a twerk-heavy Dubstep remix) Dylan’s classic lyric could in 2025 go “Come gather round people and put down your phones…” And then a paradox emerges: how did the social tool of a cell phone become synonymous with a sense of being adrift in an isolated life? Even an old grandfather clock ticks and tocks with more visceral power than a steady stream of Tik-Tok videos, the likes of which lull to sleep even the most fervid of imaginations. How did the tool of digital technology come so widely to be seen as a set of shackles, a harness of creativity and connection alike?
Herein lies a paradox: we’re social animals, but not all socialization is created equal. One sphere, that of online video gaming, at first blush seems immune to this blanket anomie. Gamers, presumably, are having a field day with the whole planet as possible participants in their adventures. In recent decades even the most shy or buttoned-down young people found expressive prowess in the realm of video games.
Silence in the Halls of Gaming
A stark lifeless reality seems to have descended on, of all places, the nacho-fuelled realm of online gaming: the internet presently is awash in articles like that of L. Winkie discussing a “lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture.”
Such realms of honor and duty abound in online gaming—team play populated by knights, gremlins, ogres, special ops, and flight simulators. Fictionalized realms that translate the performative nature of human interactions from the mundane to the magical. For some, the truest way of experiencing social solidarity occurs in these simulacra. While the body is stationary the mind conquers vast vistas along with comrades of the same ilk. Some even say that the gaming realm is uniquely situated to open the most reticent of introverts to a realm of healthy human contact and conversation. “I think [games like World of Warcraft] can affect one’s willingness to open up to someone. You don’t have to deal with the layer of bodies. You don’t have to worry about the physical barrier. All of that is stripped away when you’re speaking through a video game,” Although mediated by a gaming console or computer, people of any age or earthly ability share a game, with rules, and converse socially—it’s about as sci fi a setup as anyone would have imagined a half century ago. Yet, when games are played in silence it’s almost akin to merely playing with oneself.
Be it Backgammon or Fortnite, this paradoxical empirical reality has emerged in the online gaming sphere: silence holds sway. While game forests are still full of druid avatars and prowling gremlins the in-game chat, that glue of social good times ranging from hippie prayer circles to fraternity reunion gatherings, has fallen by the wayside. All that’s left is the game itself, played in taciturn silence. “The complex social contract, the acquaintances waiting to be forged into brotherhood—is nowhere to be found. The chat box that used to chirp with shitposts, gossip, and hyperlocal banter is conspicuously barren. If you do partner up with someone for an adventure, words are rarely exchanged. When the final boss is toppled, everyone leaves the group and dissolves into the ether.”
Studies and anecdotes conclude, then, that people are literally just there to play the game, not to interact in any meaningful human manner. The result seems a bit like automated checkout kiosks or AI chatbots suggesting improved dish-doing methods. Instead of being replaced by mindless automaton robots, have we just become more like computers? To be fair, since time immemorial, people have played games. Mahjong and backgammon boards date back millennia, for instance. Beginning in the 1970s computers entered the fray. A tennis-like game called Pong somewhat swept the nation and, since then, concentric circles of youths have learned to wile away their free time drafted into the intense and competitive world of sports—gaming, in other words. While in any gaming effort the great majority of their effort goes into conquering this or that villain or achieving one of a myriad of preordained missions, it’s in that extra non-competitive percentile of awareness that parents and onlookers tended to notice that the raw humanity of daily discourse would seep in. Pets, bills, girlfriends or boyfriends, current events, or any matter of external cultural concerns were grist for the mill. With the rise of the internet that become part of the mic-d up gaming chat system. And yet now, apparently, the woodland of non-productive gaming discussion has gone eerily quiet, maybe too quiet. It’s a bit akin to a woodland that falls silent while a stealthy cougar patrols through, its thoughtful mincing footfalls barely making an impression on the mossy forest floor. What is stalking and silencing gamers who once heckled and hazed one another in a manner most jocular – what has brought on this muteness?
It’s a question, alas, not yet to be answered. The one certainty we have is, as reported in Slate Magazine, gamers are not chatting much anymore. My brother offered a suggestion that as a great majority of online gamers have, er, aged out of teenage tomfoolery and into the sometimes-sordid but oft-serious realm of adulthood and parenthood, such men have grown into a life for which their pubescent jocularity lacks a vocabulary. While holding a digital rifle or golf club is as simple as swinging for the fences, the feeling of nuzzling an infant in swaddling clothes or holding a marriage together with twine is ever-so much more difficult to explain in the brief intervals between setting up a perfect putt or ducking for cover in the face of enemy fire. Another opinion would be that amidst the din of irrational toxicity about all manner of current events and political machinations the requisite sense of openness and understanding foundational to discourse in any social setting has eroded such that gamers collectively think “why bother” when it comes to opening their mouth about that which is relevant to the task at hand. No industrial sweatshop boss could expect more!
Yet, so long as we at AU remember to try and enlist in courses that we prefer, we at least will be able to converse gladly about what we are studying!
Reference
Winkie, L. (2024). ‘Silent But Deadly’. Slate. Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2024/12/video-games-world-warcraft-multiplayer-call-duty-halo.html