Analog Feelings Amidst Digital Distance Part I

The internet has brought the world closer NOW more than ever. Right? That's the tautology thrown around at least justify the blistering speeds at which we seem to have doubled down on social media and the embracing of our social desires being reduced down to data that is readily sold and graphed. If it is easier to make friends and meet more people now than ever before then what's going on with the epidemic of loneliness that has wracked the internet and the terminally online. Simply said there has been a systemic ramp up of making sure all of our time online has a means of being publicized for everyone to see. To elect out as a refusenik means you miss out on events or invites cuz people simply forget to put in the effort. But that is a lot of high falutin' thinking so let's look at an example.

Counter Strike was a fixture of my childhood. I would run home and play on the Motel California game server that had both a 1.6 and Source presence. I would play on both each week marveling at the new maps and getting my ass kicked by a bunch of intox 20 somethings who had no idea that a 10 year old was amongst them. I joined the forum, the IRC, and in 2009 when I was starting high school I became friends with some of them "outside" of the server. Taking a friendship outside of a server used to be a big moment as messaging apps and the like were prevalent but not yet needed to facilitate organized play of these games.

Compared to know where if I want to play a match of CS2 I either must solo queue into a game and be at the mercy of what GLICKO (CS's ELO model) thinks I am worth. Or I have to muster up four friends outside of CS to jump in the game and play with me. Sure you can queue with less, but leaving those spots up to chance leads to having "questionable teammates" who ruin the experience of a competitive match. Which in and of itself becomes a self defeating loop because you start to to only queue with people you already know instead of being exposed to new people as the incentives of the game have changed.

Let's throw out a list just for the hell of it!

-CS went from being a game built around bespoke curated communities to centralized competitive servers.

-The rise of Discord made it easier to foster friends who game rather than games that have friends in them.

-A focus on ELO and pure strain competition pushed social incentives to not taking a chance on new people for fear they will hurt your ELO.

There are other reasons why the internet has moved so much socially but the big one for me is the idea of these friends you meet online not just being inside that one game. Now that your internet friends aren't just people you meet when you are electing to play that game you wind up in very real social conundrums of what to play, what to do, who to include. The internet was already shit at managing person to person relationships without constant upkeep from both parties. Then you add the stresses of group politics, cliques, and the desire to have your specific idea of "Fun" considered– Well it leads to a lot of burn out and head aches.

I am not sure of what the solution is cuz these problems are so inherent to our social being and the net just dulls the limited faculties we have to combat social entropy. I think that groups that are focused on something are good for longevity and keeping the things going. As a proud member of multiple "Internet Retirement Homes" I can attest that an ad hoc nature of things leads to a lot of just sitting there going "well we could do something" and that being met with "hmm, maybe. Kinda busy. Oh what about this" and the back and forth and back and forth. All of that requires effort from people who sincerely care for a community. Folks like that are hard to come by. We'll come to that later on.

All this to say: Bring a better server browser back Valve.