social-interactions
Latest
The Daily Grind: Are MMOs your main social interaction?
Maybe you work at home. Maybe you're not very social in person. Maybe you've got friends across the country or around the world and there's no way you can really gather in person on a regular basis. Maybe you're living somewhere far from the rest of your social circle. Maybe you're just more comfortable when you look like an elf. Whatever the case, for some people, logging into games like EverQuest II is the big social event of the evening. That's not to say that this is the main social outlet for everyone logging in. For every player whose social circle centers around goings-on in Guild Wars 2 there are a dozen who mostly play the game to do their own things. But what about you? Are MMOs your main social interaction over the course of an average day? Or are they just a small portion of your interpersonal dealings? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Soapbox: A violent scene
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. When Star Trek Online was first released, it had more than its fair share of critics, and one of the chief complaints was the fact that the game seemed to focus largely upon combat. Sure, Star Trek had always featured combat, but it had also featured negotiation and diplomacy and unknowable phenomena alongside human drama. The idea that the entire universe could be pared down to ships and ground teams firing disruptor beams at one another didn't sit well with a sizable portion of the fanbase. Of course, Star Trek Online is hardly the only culprit. MMOs have always had a heavy focus on combat as far back as Ultima Online -- the PvP that people look back on with fond memories wasn't a game of cards, after all. Sometimes it can seem as if we have a sea of games with nothing to them except fighting and killing things, without any other meaningful interactions with the world. In a genre that offers us such a wonderful tool for social interaction, why are our games so violent? As it turns out, for a lot of very good reasons.
