Second Life, Ultima Online, VRchat, countless others. In UO people used to just hang out near the banks and talk to each other for hours as people came and went to deposit items or retrieve things. It was a very social experience, people would chill with their friends, roleplay, talk about life. All they really needed was cool clothes, ridable llamas, a neat environment, and an excuse.
Halo 2 and especially Halo 3 multiplayer saw thousands of game styles spawned outside what the devs at Bungie initially thought (griffball anyone?), give the tools and a good gameplay loop to gamers and a community will likely spawn around it very easily. Compare that to the hollow shitfest of the “metaverse” trying to commodify everything (cuss tech capital is running out of monetization pathways) and it’s really clear you can’t just artificially astroturf a community that wouldn’t naturally form.
Star wars galaxies had a great mechanic where bard players would play music to heal accumulated damage of other players. As a result, cantinas became the place all players would gather and it became a real social experience. Also I think you healed faster if you were unencumbered by clothing, so a lot of people were neckid.
Yes, people did that because social media didn’t exist. If you want to chat there are a million other platforms that are infinitely more popular than any in game chat.
Yeah but they were fun and pro-social. There were/are no skinner box machinations, no mtx, no advertising, no attention economy.
Any platforms you’d reccomend? I’m not familiar with anything like the old AOL IM chatrooms. It’s just reddit, facebook, twitter, and various other hellsites.
Second Life, Ultima Online, VRchat, countless others. In UO people used to just hang out near the banks and talk to each other for hours as people came and went to deposit items or retrieve things. It was a very social experience, people would chill with their friends, roleplay, talk about life. All they really needed was cool clothes, ridable llamas, a neat environment, and an excuse.
Halo 2 and especially Halo 3 multiplayer saw thousands of game styles spawned outside what the devs at Bungie initially thought (griffball anyone?), give the tools and a good gameplay loop to gamers and a community will likely spawn around it very easily. Compare that to the hollow shitfest of the “metaverse” trying to commodify everything (cuss tech capital is running out of monetization pathways) and it’s really clear you can’t just artificially astroturf a community that wouldn’t naturally form.
runescape used to be similar
Star wars galaxies had a great mechanic where bard players would play music to heal accumulated damage of other players. As a result, cantinas became the place all players would gather and it became a real social experience. Also I think you healed faster if you were unencumbered by clothing, so a lot of people were neckid.
Yeah, that was really cool. I never played it but I heard it was really something before that NGE update.
First mmo I ever played and I never felt that kind of magic in an mmo since.
Hanging out in cities and chatting in WoW was what I did while doing my homework
Yes, people did that because social media didn’t exist. If you want to chat there are a million other platforms that are infinitely more popular than any in game chat.
Yeah but they were fun and pro-social. There were/are no skinner box machinations, no mtx, no advertising, no attention economy.
Any platforms you’d reccomend? I’m not familiar with anything like the old AOL IM chatrooms. It’s just reddit, facebook, twitter, and various other hellsites.
Is IRC still around? It must be. Hmm.