Online Gaming and its Social Impact
Tim Craft
Comm240
Dr. Mahood
Early online gaming started in the 1980’s with what they called dialup bulletin board systems. Many of the games that started out on these systems could range from text adventures to some forms of gambling like blackjack where you would just play for points instead of actual real money. On Multi-User bulletin board systems then they sometimes had games where you could interact with each other and these were more or less fantasy games sort of like dungeon and dragons. These games would eventually evolve in what we know of today as the big online community games that most people who play online gaming these days are used to. These are called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPG. These are where a large number of people or players interact with each other in a virtual world. These days more and more kids and adults are playing these games. They sit at there computer for up to 20 hours at a time sometimes and not leave the house playing role games like World of War Craft and other games where you create a fictional character of yourself and interact with people all over the world. Now is this good for these kids and adults to keep interacting with people in a virtual world and not a real world? There have been some studies done on the impact these games have had on people and what they might end up doing to peoples social abilities in the future that we will take a look at.
There was a 1-month study that was done of an online game that looked at its social and civic impact. The study had mixed results where even though the game improved online communities, some people’s friendships took a hit because they were always involved with this game and the people playing this game became more to themselves. The subjects family interaction was not affected or they didn’t stop learning what was going on in the world but other forms of entertainment was stopped being used because they would always just play that game. It seems none of the people in the study would have a social life outside of an online community they would just stay at home and play the online game. They never really had face to face interactions as much and they would go in to what was described in the study as “cocooning.” Now how good is this for people to be bottled up in a room for however long staring at a computer playing a game? This is not going to help how people interact with each other in the long run on the outside world if this keeps happening. This certainly will not help kids to learn different things like sports or even to exercise regularly. If we keep having kids playing games like this and not going outside and doing some activities or interacting with other kids we are going to have a pretty crazy generation on our hands as far as I’m concerned. You may meet some other people through the computer interactively around the world but how many times do these people actually meet and develop real friendships? It will be interesting to see how far along these games will come and how much it will take a toll on the youth of the nation. I guess we will just have to keep doing more studies to see how it effects our society.
Williams, Dmitri. (2006). Groups and Goblins: The Social Impact of an Online Game. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 50 (4)p.651-670
