Why I'm Lonely Gaming - Extra Credits Gaming

Back in the day, playing games was a way to find your people. Your D&D group, your Warcraft guild, your Quake clan. Those people became your friends. And in a world that may have rejected many of us as dorks or nerds or whatever, games really felt like they were the method we turned to to both form connections and find community. But today, with gaming more interconnected and more popular than ever, study after study has shown that loneliness is more endemic than ever among gamers. And perhaps, it's a radical new way of thinking about matchmaking that can really help us out. Thanks so much to Clarendon and their new cooperative game Priorities for sponsoring today's important gaming discussion. But more on that awesomeness after the episode. I want to give a quick shoutout up top to John UK, the co-founder of Gametree, a platform dedicated to helping folks find teammates and form friendships through gaming, for providing us with data on this subject and helping to write this episode. Thanks, John. Despite games being an absolute pressure cooker for interpersonal connection, self-reported

gamer loneliness is hovering around 50%, which is way above the average adult loneliness figures. Meaning that young adults, for the first time since we started collecting these numbers, are actually the loneliest group in the world. But why and what can we do about it? Well, strangely, our reducing friction to play together, to access information about our favorite hobby, and even finding a game you want to play, seems like it actually ended up isolating us. Because think back, right? There was a time where we all gathered around the kid in school who had say the latest issue of Nintendo Power or something, where you shared tips and tricks, talked about strategy, and plotted your next play session with your peers, with the people you actually knew, or at least could grow to know, rather than watching content creators on YouTube, or you know, looking up a guide on Fextralife. There was a time that you had to set up a server or get a party together if you wanted to play your games. And to do so, you had to work with people, forming a small community as you went. Whereas today, many of us, myself included, more often than not, just slam that solo queue button. I mean, it's just easier, right? Couple

that with the rise in toxicity, thanks for that humans, plus anonymity, and we have a powerful brew for isolating folks within our games, even the multiplayer ones, rather than having them help meet our social need. So, how can we solve this? Well, of course, there are the tried and true methods, things like inviting people you know in the real world to play, or looking for like-minded groups on social hubs like Discord. But, as designers, we might be able to do more than that. So, I'm going to throw out a wild idea, one sparked by the research the Game Tree folks have done. What if we matchmade for positive social interactions? For decades, we've thought of matchmaking in exactly one way. How do we match you against an opponent of approximately your skill in a short amount of time? And most all of our design efforts have been towards making marginal improvements to that process, to finding tiny refinements to improve match time, or matching you to a more evenly matched opponent. And that's really complicated. And to see exactly why, you can check out our video here. But, what if we radically rethought the parameters of how we approach matchmaking? What if we try to match you for the most enjoyable game, rather than

the fastest, most competitively balanced one? What if we actually did social matchmaking? Because, think about it. I know for me, there are lots of times when I'm hopping into a casual game of something, and I'd much rather be on a team with a handful of awesome people whose play style and reason of play matched mine, even if they were a bit worse at the game than me, rather than suffer through a half hour of rage and toxicity with people who are technically better at no-scoping or something. Or, to be consistently grouped with people that had similar interests and social decorum, meaning that in-game chat was actually an option worth considering. Personally, I'd even be willing to wait a bit longer for a match if I knew it reduced the likelihood of, say, someone giving up in the first 10 minutes, or throwing the game because of personality clashes, or someone raging that the bottom lane got off to a bad start. And I'm sure that most of you watching have had that experience, too. Your precious few hours of free Every that you got to sit down and game just ended up leaving you stressed and maybe more miffed than you were before you played because you got matched with jerks instead of people you liked. So, what if we offered the option to match make you with

like-minded players? The easiest way to do this would be to offer you an opt-in survey as a player to set criteria that matters to you and a toggle that said, "Match make me with like-minded team." or "Match make for skill." Or there could be a third-party service that could collect the data once and then supply that to games you play on an opt-in basis. Heck, we could even make those after game pop-ups that say the thing like, "Did you enjoy this game?" actually mean something and use them to refine our social matchmaking algorithm. The system could even try to proactively match people who have played together and gotten along in the past, helping to naturally foster new friendships and weed out bad actors who just want to troll. And simply by conceptualizing matchmaking in this way, we'll start to find new and more powerful techniques to allow our games to once again forge the social bonds that we so desperately need. So, let's use these ideas to fight back against the trend of technology to separate us, to divide us, to allow us to dehumanize each other and instead use it to make our games feel more akin to dropping by your friendly local game store. Let's create community and find

each other rather than pushing each other away or shutting folks out when we fire up our games. And you know what? We'll be the first to start in a small way. Until something akin to social matchmaking exists in our games, we're inviting all of you to join our Patreon and hop in our Discord where we're planning to host an EC community game day in the coming months. I'm really pumped about this and we'll post exact dates later. But until then, please join us on there, hang out, chat it up, and make some new like-minded friends. We'd also be remiss if we didn't also point to GameTree since they kind of got us thinking in this direction in the first place. Their goal is to help gamers connect and game with like-minded folks, so you can check them out as well. Most importantly though, just know that you're not alone. Look, we've all been there. I've had plenty of nights where the only light is the glow of a screen, where I want to have a meaningful conversation with another person, but it seems just so difficult and distant, and I didn't know where to start. So, instead, I just boot up a game, right? That's really hard, and it's understandable to feel lonely while engaging with this hobby. But, I think if there's anything you take away from

this episode, it's that I just want you to know that there are people out there, inside the game or outside of it, in communities on the internet or IRL. I found a lot of mine through the Extra Credits community, and I'm very thankful for it, and I do truly believe that if you don't give up searching, you can really find a like-minded and caring community as well. Sorry for the bit of emotionalness at the end of the episode, but it's important to me. I hope this stuff got you thinking about ways that you can combat your own loneliness if you're experiencing it, and thanks again to John for sharing all the data he and his company collected, because it did really put a lot into perspective about how, even though we can all feel lonely, we are definitely not alone in that fact. And, in a stroke of very good luck, our sponsor for this week is actually a game designed to bring people together, Priorities, by Claridon Games. So, as you know, games are really in our blood here, and we're always very, very, very excited to tell you about a great game when we find one. You know, you might even say it's our top priority. Thank you, thank you. I'll be here for the rest of this read. In all seriousness, Priorities is a heck of a

lot of fun. It's this easy-to-learn party game of extreme truths and absurd choices, where each round, you and your friends are tasked with ranking five random items from love to loathe. For example, let's say I pull friendship, Taylor Swift, climate change, being right, and kittens. Would you be able to guess how I ranked them? Any rankings you get right go to the players, and any you get wrong go to the game. That's right, it's a PvE experience, where you and your friends are working together against the game, because whoever can spell out the word priorities with the letters on the back of the cards first wins. And, I got to say, after a few rounds, I learned that there's a bunch of stuff about my friends that still surprises me. You can snag your own copy of Priorities at your nearest Target, or if you'd like to prioritize your time, you can click here and then afterward, why not rank another one of our videos here. Once upon a time, Michael Hoggatt, Kuyakoy, Joseph Blain, Easy Coin, Dominic Valenciana, Arclight Games, Angelo Valenciana, and Ahmed Ziad Turk were the best legendary patrons. That time is now.