How I substituted video games for friends

When I used to spend every single free time (and even not free time) three or four years ago in my room playing Star Wars: Battlefront II and then later SOCOM 3, I don’t think people (by which I mean my parents) really understood how important it was for me.

Through events which I have always accepted as due to my own failings as a human being, I managed to alienate myself from my newly acquired friends. So, once again, I was friendless, although, probably, more friendless than I had ever been at that point. For most of a year or slightly more I was completely on my own and I had little to none social interaction.

This was probably the same time I encountered multiplayer games. I had played MMORPGs (well, at that point, one, Runescape, but despite the whole RPGing and MMO aspect, it’s surprisingly hard to actually play with people, when most of the players seem to miss the point and care only in getting their own stats up, and such the only interaction ends up being trading, with little to no words exchanged except prices and items), but not console games online. I discovered that by simple plugging in my spare ethernet cable to my PS2, I could game online (I had mistakenly thought some more techno-jiggery-pokery was required, but I decided to try it and see and I was rewarded surprisingly). The only game I had at that point was that had online capacity was Battlefront II, so I played that. The game is a third-person shooter, and the multiplayer mode was identical to the game’s single player instant action mode, except the NPCs were replaced with real people. Who could make creative decisions and make each game individual (because when you’re playing with NPCs, you learn very quickly what they are not programmed to do, and so you can outsmart and out manoeuvre them very easily). At this point, the only form of communication I had with other players was nothing, because even though the game could be used with a headset, I didn’t have one and I don’t think most of them did either. Occasionally you would accidentally team up with another player, bond other a quick jumping up and down on the spot to show you acknowledged their presence and comradeship, and then you would simply try and find that player and tag with them, covering each other’s back etc.

Eventually I attempted to buy a headset to use with the game, but through a happy accident I bought SOCOM 3 (*headset not included* – despite Amazon listing it under the one which did have a headset included!). This game used a headset heavily, even in the single player game, to communicate with your NPCs, which was rather cool (though I found the button method of giving commands more reliable). I ended up playing SOCOM rather than Battlefront more (they were both third-person shooters, so both worked almost identically, but SOCOM had more functions, and was actually a tactical shooter, which I believe is one of the best game genres). And the multiplayer games were more involving. Because SOCOM 3 (although, obviously, not my copy) were sold bundled with a headset, nearly everyone who played had a headset. So you had a dozen people on your screen each with a voice.

I feel here’s a good a place as any to explain how I operate (or at least used to operate when I was 13, 14) online. I had already set up an online alias of Imagine Wizard when I was like 7 which I still use to this day. And so I used it as my gaming handle. Now, when I gamed on these multiplayers, the person who the people I played with interacted with was not me, it was my online persona. And the only thing that persona and me had in common was a similar, but probably not identical, personality. Otherwise, I considered them two different people. If people asked me questions, they were asking Imagine Wizard, not Haaris Qureshi, and I answered as such. Of course, despite what the scare-mongering media want people to think, most people who game online just want to game and don’t really care much about you, and those who do ask are doing it out of a genuine interest and want to be sociable (which is not to say there aren’t such things as online predators, there are, and they are a most despicable people,  but they roam areas of the Internet where vulnerable children are more expected to be, chat rooms and the like, not on a male-dominated shooter video game, where people have less desire to talk then to play, as opposed to chatrooms, where the whole point of it is to talk). My way of operating wasn’t really out of a fear, it’s just how I rolled, I thought it sensible, considering that I recognised my lack of maturity and judgement in such matters, so the safe option would be to not play as myself but as an online persona (which, now I think about it, is actually a mature and logical way of doing it, so yay … go me). Ofc, I’m more open about my identity now online. I made a decision on my 16th birthday that I was going to start vlogging, because it had always interested me, and that obviously required me to expose myself (no, not in that way) online as me. But now I feel that I’m mature enough to make judgements about such matters. That said, when I do game now, if someone says they want to know anything more than where I’m from (I’ll start off by saying England, then Yorkshire, and if I’m feeling in a good mood, Bradford), I simply tell them to google my handle (ImagineWizard) and they’ll find out easily enough, given that, thanks mainly to Google+ (but also Twitter), searching for the above brings up my real name easily enough.
I make this explanation so when I go back to talking about the games, you don’t think I was at all letting these people into my actual life as a permanent and satisfactory substitution for real people (despite the implications of my blog title, a necessary sacrifice for the sake of succinctness), nor was I putting myself at risk of being groomed or whatever. The media has done a good job of portraying games as a select group of ‘nerdy loners’ who can’t distinguish reality from make-believe, an extremely inaccurate and aged perception that I hope will soon disappear as gaming becomes rapidly more mainstream.

So yeah. Through my new found ability to talk to actual people while gaming with them made it easier to bond with other games rather than just jumping around them to get their attention. I say ‘bond’, and I will no doubt using ‘befriend’ later on, but, as was the point of my paragraph above, it was my gaming persona ‘befriending’ these other players’ avatars and handles. I never at any time cared for the person beyond the name or computer generated character on my screen. To me, I perceived them simply as a extremely advance NPC. And I only ever befriended these characters, not the actual person. I got to know that person’s humour, personality, gaming style, but never their actual personal life. And I only showed them the same, my humour, my personality and gaming style. And tbh, that’s all anyone ever cared about, and that’s enough to form a friendship, of sorts.

But the point to this was that being able to game with actual people and talk and joke and have a good time and being then able to talk about this afterwards was an amazing feeling that I was lacking in real life. Because I didn’t have anyone to be able to do this with in real life. And these people expressed happiness and joy when they saw me log in, and actually noted if I had been absent from the game for more than usual (which is more of a damn than anyone in real life gave me). And by nature of playing a game which relied on teamwork and communication to coordinate the strategy, you would often find yourself playing with the same group of people each time. And, unlike in real life, when I was always the last to be chosen for anything, and the first forgotten, this was never the case in the game. Sure, a few times I was chosen last for a team, but that was just because someone has to be last (and maybe perhaps because I was the newest of the gamers to the game), but not because of me. And that was a better treatment some so called friends gave me in real life. So from this, could one blame me for finding comfort in this simulation of actually being liked and wanted, when I lacked that in real life? And it wouldn’t be a feeling I would feel in real life until two years later, although, current events threaten to shine a new light on the actual legitimacy of  that friendship …

But yeah, this had the one bad downside of making me sort of addicted to those games, and I neglected some stuff, like homework and other stuff. But nothing major. I didn’t stop eating or sleeping (well, not to an unhealthy extend, probably the same lack of sleep that any teenager gets 😛 ). But yeah. That’s the reason why I liked, and still do, multiplayer games so much. They don’t judge you so much on there, and you always tend to feel included and wanted. And when that’s how you’re made to feel on a make-belief world, but not on in actual reality .. .well, it says a lot on the state of reality, doesn’t it?