Rediscovering Internet Friendship in WildStar

PC Gamer’s Chris Thursten discusses why the social connections made through MMOs started becoming less important for him throughout the years, and how an encounter in Carbine’s colorful sci-fi MMO briefly made him remember that they were the reason he started playing the genre in the first place. Here’s a snippet:

After a while, I stopped talking to strangers. It became easy to forget that they were why I started playing MMOs in the first place. Fifteen years ago, the notion that every character on the screen represented a real person (!) was extraordinary, epochal. The first Italian person I ever met was an Ultima Online character. I was eleven, and immediately told my mum. I remember her excitedly trying to explain it to a family friend how I’d been making friends in other countries. I’d been talking to strangers on the internet, but it was OK because they were a wizard or something.

I got older and those isolated encounters became friendship networks, guilds and communities. I made friends for life in Dark Age of Camelot and followed some of those people to World of Warcraft, or ran into them by chance on Star Wars Galaxies’ American roleplay servers. Then, a little further on, I drifted away from the genre. I started playing singleplayer games and MMOs that you could play by yourself, and the urge to engage in zone chat faded. By the time The Old Republic rolled around, I was a committed solo player and besides, I had the PC Gamer guild on hand when I did feel like running a dungeon. My colleagues played too. Not only had I lost the urge to talk to strangers, I no longer had a need.