The Age of the Web Hermit

Gaming

For some amongst us, the idea of spending the majority of a 24 hour period in front of a game of sort or another is nothing new. We’ve all known, or been, that guy so enamoured of his new game that he loses track of time and before he knows what’s what he’s missed an appointment, or accidentally played through til dawn without noticing the time, or died of exhaustion.

Being sat in front of a PC gives you all the ways to kill time in the world and more, but this capacity for a device to take over a persons life for extended periods of time is nothing new.

Spending too much time in World Of Warcraft is no different to spending all day fishing, or on the golf course, or working on your car or a million other distractions where a person can relax and do their own thing.

That said, the MMORPG is one of the first mediums to properly allow a person to exist more as a web entity than as an actual person and while they are certainly not a new phenomena (as anybody who camped the early morning rare spawns in Ultima Online can tell you), the scale of their spread throughout the gaming community can not be underestimated.

Players create their avatar in these games and, by and large, while he she or it is not exactly a fully rounded character it’s safe to say that few players live their in game lives as they do their lives outside.


The well to do and respectable accountant becomes the trash talking rogue camping the new player areas, and the failing computer studies undergraduate becomes a PvP hero and legendary guild leader. The debate as to how bad online gaming is for a person and in what amounts has raged for nearly as long as there have been online games. Some might say that playing World Of Warcraft or Counter-Strike is not the most active of pastimes. This is true, but it’s not as if, in the event of the Blizzard servers suddenly all crashing and wiping themselves, the six million players of World of Warcraft would suddenly pick up footballs, hop on bicycles and head off to the park for some fresh air and a kick about. Do games make people inactive, or do inactive people flock to games?

Some might also say that online games lack the camaraderie and teamwork of, for example, playing for a local sports team. This is perhaps true, though we live in an age were many gaming clans and communities have been around for years, with players knowing each other for just as long. With voice communications in use during play and in many cases get togethers in the most easily reached country for drinking binges, we are starting to see the gaming clan emerge as a social group. While the most disturbing quality of the latest generations of online games could be said to be their addictiveness and their capacity to consume huge swathes of time, it is fair to say that in the main this is at least time spent with friends. One of the greatest factors that keeps a player in an MMORPG is their ties to their friends in game.


So our Web Hermit has got game, he’s got a clan, and he’s got people to talk to while he’s gaming. With Xbox Live leading the way for even consoles to become sociable gaming systems we’re seeing a revolution in online play. Gone are the days of the silent unwashed loner in his basement blazing away at complete strangers, now we see the gamer is a more rounded individual, communicating with others using TeamSpeak and maintaining enduring friendships which extend beyond just the game itself. He still doesn’t have to wash, or put any trousers on, though.