Games and social interaction

I am guilty of being one of those people who assumed that intense game playing made you anti-social. I made this assumption because two members of my extended family were intense game players. I would observe them spending very long hours, often starting at night and ending at dawn, just playing games. They would then sleep the whole day and wake at night again for a repeat. But slipping from my mind was the fact that they played alongside other people on the internet, and this is obviously a social interaction. Playing games with people can be likened to partying in some ways because you are having fun with a group of people. Had these guys gone out having fun partying the whole night instead, i don't think i would have thought of them as antisocial. But because i couldn't see the people they played with, i made the false call of assuming they were anti social.

However, I will argue that while games can be a social activity, it cannot be deemed as equivalent in quality to real life social interactions. One of the guys i mentioned earlier is a 58 year old male who is an avid "Perfect World" player. He has been playing it for years and has at least ten different avatars. One incident i remember clearly is watching him play using a female twenty-something 'fairy' avatar. It was really amusing to watch the 58 year old man sitting on his computer chair pretending to be a fairy in Perfect World. What was even more interesting was the number of times he got hit on by other male avatars who assumed the person behind the screen was just like their avatar. Likewise the 'fairy' can also never be sure of who is sending those requests for friendship.

The point is that you never really know who you are talking to in games. This can be problematic for the trusting gamer who likes to make friends online mainly because the gamer won't know if the person is trustworthy. Body language accounts for about 75% of an interaction. Since they aren't interacting in person, the gamer won't know what their friends look like. This leaves a whole range of body language cues out of the picture that can tip you off as to whether your "friend" is a dodgy character or an innocent gamer.

If you cant even fulfill the basic social component of knowing who you are interacting with, social interaction in games can hardly be likened to true social interaction.