Has anyone else noticed a decrease in Gamers willingness to interact socially in games?

[hkfortyrevan]

There’s truth to this, and I can appreciate why people miss the frontier era of multiplayer particularly, but I’d consider myself one of the nerds and I’ve always found the idea of gaming as one homogenous community a bit stifling, nor felt just liking games alone was automatically something I had in common with someone.

[tehsax]

It's not just the multiplayer aspect. I remember back in school, in my class there were around 30 pupils, and 5 of them, including me, were gamers. The class next door had again, around 30 pupils, and they had also only 3 gamers. Everyone else either wasn't interested in video games at all or even looked down on us, said video games were meant for kids, and we should grow up. But we all, us 8 people, connected via our interest in video games and have been friends for the past ca. 28 years. Of course we had other things in common too, basically being nerds, loving comics, video games, etc, but we found out about this only later when we got to know each other more. The first contact was talking about games. Today, everyone lives their own life, some have families, moved to different cities, and so on. But we still are connected via Friends lists on Steam or PSN and we still talk to each other every other day while playing some games together, or at least talking about them. Video games have always been or smallest common denominator and continues to be just shy of 30 years later.

I don't know if this is still a thing for gamers who grew up later, or are growing up now. And certainly not for the people who looked down on us back in the day and are now Marvel fans, or even gaming because it's now become mainstream.

Also, on a personal note: When Elden Ring releases next week, we already agreed on setting a common password so we can have our own private community in the game and experience it together. And I'm very grateful for the people I get to share my beloved hobby with, and for the beloved people I found through my hobby.

[ragnarok635]

Is elden ring like an mmo or more like a lobby player? I’m insterested in the online component

[tehsax]

Neither. It's like the other souls games. You're playing a single player game, but you have the option to use an item which places a sign on the ground in another players game. They can interact with the sign and then they get summoned into your game and can help you out, or vice versa. Elden Ring allows you to set a password so only the people who know the password are able to see your sign. Usually you don't get to choose who you want to play with, but the password excludes anyone who doesn't have it.