At heart as an online bunch of gamers we are all a bit exhibitionistic, if that is a word. We go online with our games, we let people see what we are playing, we let people see what we have accomplished and even let people see who our friends are. Yes of course some of us don’t fall into that pigeon hole but it is safe to say that the vast majority do, so surely even when you are offline you can still get the same enjoyment from gaming. For me it would seem not, strangely!
With moving house recently also came moving my Internet connection over which I thought would have been easy as pie, big mistake. For a start it took two weeks for the engineers to connect my phone line and now another ten days to get broadband up and running. Of course during this time I could still play all of my games, as much as I wanted to, but for some reason I didn’t want to. When faced with a night sitting in by myself where I could rattle through a game I opted to clean the bathroom, wash dishes or even watch a DVD ( Resident Evil Degeneration is awesome). What could have brought on this strange behaviour, I am a gamer, playing games is what I do. The only thing I can come up with is that I am not online for everyone to see, I can’t send or receive messages. I can’t even download the Resident Evil 5 demo, although some kind soul called Dan brought it round for me to try.
On a personal level, I have had friends round to my flat and we have sat and played games in the same room, something I haven’t done in years, it felt good. It is something that I would now like to do on a regular basis, have gaming night where I can actually see other people and get them drinks and crisps. This worries me slightly as I feel that sitting by myself and playing games may become a thing of the past. Have we all become solo gamers through the convenience of online gaming? Yes, we interact with others when we are online but we still sit ourselves in our own space knowing that instead of ushering friends out and clearing the table we can simply switch off the power. When was the last time you had friends round to play games, when was the last time you were offline for a month? I couldn’t remember either.
Maybe all this will change when I regain the ability to be online again but I’m not so sure. I think there may be the temptation to be online but appear offline or maybe absence really does make the heart grow fonder. None the less, in the space of the next month we have Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5 to play with other people and I’m not going to miss either of them, but I do hope that at least one of them will mean friends visiting each other for good old gaming nights, I’ll bring the beer.
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