Social Gaming

Whilst it could be suggested that the attractive and initially harmless aspects of game playing can be taken advantage of in social situations, what ultimately occurs is what I would consider to be a break down in the overall quality of communication between friends through the forms of socializing that take presidence. Any Internet café bares witness to the long hours different kinds of people spend playing games like Counter Strike or World of Warcraft. The former example is a relatively simple game of point and shoot but this process coupled with peoples drive to out compete others manifests into long hours of repetitive game playing. I have heard examples of this competitive drive in people erupt into abusive swearing matches and actual fights. This decay in social behaviour is borne from gaming and is encouraged by what initially attracts people to gaming in the first place. Anyone who has played World Of Warcraft can easily admit that it requires a huge amount of time to reach certain levels and obtain the necessary items to remain in any way competitive in the world of Warcraft, or to kill the next boss or player in the next raid. An observation that could be made of online games like WOW is that the developers take advantage of this need to reach and maintain achievements by releasing new updates, thereby reinvigorating the players drive to play through increasing potential modes of exploration. It has become the culture of people who go to internet cafes to spend these long hours sitting in front of computers, sustaining hunger with the poor variety of unhealthy foods available at internet cafes, at the fish and chip shop down the road, or not at all. Apart from the degraded behaviour of people who spend time at internet cafes the health issues that one could experience as a result of spending up to and well beyond 2 to 3 hours at a café are concerning.