Thursday, December 13, 2012

Like the break of drought, social gaming has once again staked its claim in my free time in a big way, consuming my nights in virtual hails of gunfire exchanged with Russians and other aliens. It’s been a while. You may recall how social gaming took a backseat for most of the year. In the last week or so, though, the pastime has reverted from secret shame to shared enterprise, with fresh insights.

I can’t pinpoint why exactly we stopped. A few factors were likely to blame, including a large-scale migration to PC gaming, which I continue to resist willfully. There were also a string of titles that didn’t really lend themselves to congress. Or maybe, like any dialogue, our give-and-take had reached its natural conclusion. In any case, we’re back at it, albeit with a few key differences. For one thing, we’ve been sticking to a responsible timetable, where we collectively throw in the towel around midnight.

I’ve also been keenly aware of the context–of the playing itself. Online gaming is a veritable petri dish of sociological curiosities: how the Xbox acts as a kind of de facto babysitter, for instance, with children and tweens playing the most violent games with strangers, or how people yearn for validation in these makeshift worlds. Why the ability to accurately place an on-screen reticle should have any bearing on masculinity is anybody’s guess. Who am I to judge, though? At the end of the day, we’re all engaged in digital murder. My virtual bodycount numbers, what, in the thousands? Hundreds of thousands? We are like the warmongers of antiquity, deficient only in muscle mass, honor, and killer instinct.