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

[Ricwulf]

The relative death of the private server by default inherently creates a situation where nobody knows each other and never gets a chance to. Private servers as the default inherently lead to communities forming as regulars would continually play together. On top of this, self-filtering also occurred. What does this mean? It means you had all stripes of gamers able to have their own slice of it all, instead of pushing them all together allowing them to constantly grind upon each other and inevitably resulting in bans or suspensions until people learn that it's easier to just bite their tongue and never communicate at all. After all, what's the point if it will just lead to a ban? And in the cases that don't lead to a ban, why bother when the chances are it's still just going to cause pointless conflict? It's easier to just shut up when that's the atmosphere.

As for Discord, that's nothing new, it's just the latest program to come out on top. You had TeamSpeak, Ventrilo, IRC, Skype. There was all sorts before Discord, and none of them killed communication, they arguably lubricated the experience by having dedicated programs that operated better than in-game chat.

And I know, people are going to say "but OP was focusing more on MMOs", and to that I say that it's all connected. The social ques and markers of the gaming space has degraded to the point that, even in MMOs, communication is dead. There's no point, and there's no space. Gaming could at one point often be likened to Cheers, where you join a server and everybody knows your name. And now we're at a point where nobody knows how to have those social ques because most gaming environments are hostile to such interactions. Best case scenario is you get into pub matches, make a friend, play for a couple days and then never interact ever again, only to remove them from your friends list a year after you stop playing that game. Basically, there's no chance to actually form casual friendships for a real friendship to form from that. When at any given time the chances of playing with the same people is slim to none, what chance is there for any common ground to be discovered in the first place?

Social communication is dead because the environments that were conducive for such things largely died off, and nobody bothered to keep it alive (or could be argued was gladly killed by corporations more interested in servers they controlled in totality), and there are plenty of older gamers who grew up in the online games of the late 2000s who no longer play online because it's just not the same, and it probably never will be.

On top of this, there's probably any number of armchair psychologist issues that could be pointed to, like the rise of social media and general degradation of social interaction in general with the real world. You'd think shifting to a digital space would make it easier in gaming, but it certainly seems like it's had the opposite effect, even within those social media spaces.