The gaming peers = friends thing

[Callan S.]

Recently wondering: Does the association of gaming together and thus being friends together (apart from geek falacies) also come from the game content?

I mean, a lot of games sort of revolve around going camping, but with swords and monsters (if you get what I mean). In real life, if you go camping with people or other excursions, you often end up bonding with them to some degree (I think).

Does the virtual experience bond as well, by triggering some of the same feeling in real life (while gaming) as real life camping would? But it requires the same framework for the friendship to remain, thus a compulsive urge in some groups to game together so as to remain (virtual) friends?

[SlurpeeMoney]

I've just finished reading Demosthenes' "On the Crown," and the abrupt change from Greek rhetoric (albeit translated) to common English is quite disconcerting. Forgive any strangeness in the post to follow.

I'm getting from your post that you are either not entirely sure about your place in your gaming group, or their place with you. Are they your friends? If they are strangers, but you campaign together, does that make them friends? What exactly defines friendship when considering such a narrow topic as gaming?

I suppose it really comes down to who you game with. As one of the few gamers in a town of 5000, I've been forced to make new gamers. Hence, all of my gamers are good friends. We stop gaming with people we don't hang out with on a personal level.

When I was living away from town, in a huge city of 20, 000 (yeah yeah, laugh laugh), I didn't know anyone, but found a poster advertising a game at the local comic shop. So I joined in. Of all of the players there, only one of them came close to being a "friend" and even he only associated with me at the table. Were it not for other common interests, which were readilly available at the comic shop we both frequented, we'd barely see one another.

Does gaming with people make those people your friends? No. Not really. Does gaming with your friends help make you better friends? I've found it to be so, but others might disagree. If you game with strangers, they're still strangers; they are simply strangers you happen to game with.

Defining friendship in such a narrow focus as gaming is difficult. Friendship tends to be very open to interpretation. I game with my friends. That makes my gaming group very, very small. There are other gamers in town now (groups started by my gamers while I was absent, and a few old-schoolers who play on the weekends), and while I have played a few games with them, I would consider them only passing aquaintances. Does gaming help you bond with your friends? Sure does. But you're not going to be bonding with people you don't know, gaming, camping or otherwise.

Kris
"I wish I could use magic while camping. Levitate the food so bears don't eat it. Magic Missile my fish. Use fireballs to start fires in the mornings. Ah, 't'would be bliss."

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Does the association of gaming together and thus being friends together (apart from geek falacies) also come from the game content?

I think there are different levels of human relationships. For some, the relationship is kept alives by the context of the association. For example, I do not see or hear from anyone in high school or past jobs. I just didn't make very deep friends. When I left school or changed jobs, the relationship ended.

[matthijs]

Callan,

I think the amount of bonding, whether the shared experience is virtual or not, depends a lot on the emotional investment in that experience. So if I go on a weekend trip abroad with colleagues I don't really like as part of a team-building experience (fictional example), we might not bond. But if I play a game with someone I don't know, and we put a lot of ourselves in the game and feel like we've learned something on a personal level, we might bond.

In my view, to be friends with someone, you need to do different things. So if you only meet this person when you go fishing, or playing chess, or playing some RPG, it's hard to become real friends. Any activity can be a good opener, a kind of ritualized, formalized way of establishing contact - perhaps in a setting that otherwise wouldn't allow such contact (I have this picture in my head of two gruff, silent, old Japanese samurai of opposing factions meeting to play Go...); but it can't take the place of, or be the definition of, a friendship.

[Callan S.]

SM: Err, no, I don't believe I was refering to myself. I'd recently read a post about someone else who had finally decided to stop gaming with friends because it just wasn't fun. He'd said their was some fall out around it. To me it read that the gaming was percieved as an important enough part of the friendships that fallout was due...I'm guessing that if he declined to play timesplitters (PS2 game) with them any more, there would be no fall out from that.

Other more extreme examples come from some of the articles here (damn, can't remember where to look in them though), RPG.net stories and general fanatic gamer stories that float around.

Most importantly are the geek falacies. Pretty much my suggestion is in addition to those somewhat. If they found friendship through some medium, they must maintain the medium to maintain the friendship. The fallacie being that they must continue the medium or that they are friends to begin with.

[M. J. Young]

As activity choices for getting to know people, gaming is pretty good. However, to get to know people, you have to have that as an objective; and that's still no guarantee that you're going to become friends, or even like each other.

It's conventional wisdom that if you get together for dinner with people, this will facilitate getting to know them. A lot of churches hold pot-luck dinners and the like specifically so the congregation can get together in an unstructured setting and get to know each other. I've been to many, and I suppose I knew that's why these were held; but it was brought home to me recently that at most of these events families sit as discrete groups, couples tend to drift off to their own tables, and friends always sit with friends. We're new in this church, but we've known the pastor and his wife for quite a few years now; attending our first such function, we were sitting and chatting with who? Sure, we made comments to others at the dessert table, and everyone made us feel welcome, but mostly in a peripheral "good to see you here" sort of way. Yet in many cultures there are few things as intimate as really sharing meals with someone.

There are few things as potentially intimate as role playing games. As I've observed before, these are intensely social activities, in which we get together and interact with each other by creating an imaginary set of people who interact with each other, so that we're exploring how a group of people we've created interact by ourselves interacting. You can reveal and discover a lot about yourself and each other in such a context. Then again, you can keep it all shallow, and you can ignore the revelations as just a bit of play, if you're not interested.

It's a bit like attending classes. If you're there, you're going to learn something. You might not learn enough to be worth repeating, but you'll know more than you would if you slept in while the class was in session. If you interact with people through a game, you're going to be exposed to things about them, some of which you might not discover any other way. If you don't choose to pursue friendships with these people, that's not much different than reading society notices in the paper (Oh, look, they're getting married; I see his father died). If you do, getting together to play games can be a key piece in building relationships.

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

The bank of threads that really dove into this issue some time ago is compiled in The Infamous Five, under the heading "Social Context." I consider it to be pretty serious stuff, and I hope folks take some time to review it.

Best,
Ron

[Alf_the_Often_Incorrect]

Recently wondering: Does the association of gaming together and thus being friends together (apart from geek falacies) also come from the game content?

I mean, a lot of games sort of revolve around going camping, but with swords and monsters (if you get what I mean). In real life, if you go camping with people or other excursions, you often end up bonding with them to some degree (I think).

Does the virtual experience bond as well, by triggering some of the same feeling in real life (while gaming) as real life camping would? But it requires the same framework for the friendship to remain, thus a compulsive urge in some groups to game together so as to remain (virtual) friends?

I'm going to respond to this before reading anyone else's response, so that I am not influenced by their opinions.

I think that this could happen. Just as people bond on MMORPGs without ever even meeting each other, just in the process of dungeon-diving together, I can definitely see a group of strangers getting together, playing an RPG together, and becoming friends. I don't agree with the camping metaphor, though. It's just a game, but, as a social activity, bonding will occur while playing it.

[Alf_the_Often_Incorrect]

SM: Err, no, I don't believe I was refering to myself. I'd recently read a post about someone else who had finally decided to stop gaming with friends because it just wasn't fun. He'd said their was some fall out around it. To me it read that the gaming was percieved as an important enough part of the friendships that fallout was due...I'm guessing that if he declined to play timesplitters (PS2 game) with them any more, there would be no fall out from that.

Other more extreme examples come from some of the articles here (damn, can't remember where to look in them though), RPG.net stories and general fanatic gamer stories that float around.

Most importantly are the geek falacies. Pretty much my suggestion is in addition to those somewhat. If they found friendship through some medium, they must maintain the medium to maintain the friendship. The fallacie being that they must continue the medium or that they are friends to begin with.

Do you think that if people who met through roleplaying will cease to be friends if they stop roleplaying together? If doing so means no longer making contact, then yes. But if they still see each other daily, I see no reason why they would be alienated.