Quoting lifekatana,
reply 13
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Also, this whole "go play outside" is a flawed argument. Gaming with friends will only strenghten social contact. Not playing or knowing about games is probably worse for your social contacts . Games like WOW are pretty lethal to your social life though, but you can also see the other side of the coin; many people that get addicted to these games, aren't super social to begin with. Making them play outside, hang out with friends may be fun for most of us, but I have some friends who really don't. Gaming with friends is a lot more fun for them.
I dont think thats right. Communication actually is 90% nonverbal and only 10% is what you really say, the rest is tonality, bodylanguage etc. Just tell me how you want to learn using facial expressions, voice tonality and these things to have an interesting conversation when all you use is a keyboard. Not to mention conversational threads - do you chat with your friends about things that non-gamers find interesting? Do you talk in your everyday life about headshots, items, weapon accuracies? Ever thought that this might be strange to other people? I knew a lot of guys that did and it was strange in fact. Ever flirted with a girl? Do you tell her about your AK47 skills as well?
You dont learn social skills in gaming. You just learn to create a fictional social network with your nerdy friends that all share the same problem - not knowing what to talk when encountering other people. I am talking in extremes here of course, not saying that the games are the problem and every gamer will become like this, but that people that tend to be this way use the games to distract from their problems. Gaming can become a problem, that is a fact.
1. Emotions are very usefull in circumventing that problem.
2. You talk with them face to face, not with the computer.
3. People have the idea gaming is the problem people sit so long behind a computer. A lot of classmates of mine sit atleast an hour a day on Myspace/Facebook/Hyves &MSN. The main reason of MMORPG's being so addictive is the social part; being part of a guild/groups. Most of the actual gameplay is repetitive and boring. It's pretty scary.
Most people have played a videogame atleast a few times in the 21th. No you don't, you talk about it like each other shared hobby; if other people are near(you know, and don't hate) you usually talk about something else. The real thing is actually, that
And yes I have flirted with a girl, and no obviously I wouldn't tell her about my mad AK-47 skills. (for the record, I wasn't talking about myself in my original post). Some people who are "hardcore"gamers, (so not your average teenager) will keep it strictly separated from their social lives, they won't talk to non-gamers about it. Some people don't... there are mostly the classical nerd. And ovbviously they have few friends, most of them antisocial and yes also gamers. The problem people don't see however, is that these people are antisocial to begin with. I have this friend(he is atleast honest and doesn't follow like a sheep) who is a hardcore gamer. Cut him off his games, he still is very reclusive and antisocial, he was it before he was a gamer. Before the "gaming era" there were outsiders, they were antisocial. Now in the gaming era they are called gamers. Although the computer has an antisocializing effect on that, it's marginal. On the flipside: it's much easier to get to know someone on the interwebs than do it face to face, which is a blessing for the timid.
Your friends just sound like the average teenager; he is pretty unlikely to get addicted.
P.S. Sorry for the bad wording; english is not my native language.
