A while back, possibly on HN, there was an article about why it’s generally harder to make friends or find a community after graduation. It outlined some of the

A while back, possibly on HN, there was an article about why it’s generally harder to make friends or find a community after graduation. It outlined some of the requirements for developing strong friendships and community. The ones that stood out to me are: -shared experiences -social bonding (knowing the basics of others lives, casual conversation, etc...) -regular serendipitous interactions with people you know It seems to me that current online services do a great job with the first element, have mixed results with the 2nd, and fail at the 3rd. The shared experience is amazing- games transport you to new worlds and give you something to do. The social bonding aspect varies wildly by game and play context. I haven’t chatted socially playing an FPS online for at least 10 years, but I don’t play with real life friends. I know some guys in clans who do. The last one, regular serendipitous interaction seems a hard fail. Basically what this means for friendships and community is that you run in to people you know unintentionally. In real life, I finally started feeling a part of my new community when I started to run into people in knew at the grocery store. I’ve started to recognize some user names on HN, which thrills me (including identifying an old college buddy I hadn’t talked to in years.) My gaming experience? I’m tossed into an experience full of 20-100 random people from all over the world, and then 15 minutes later (or at best the next day) it’s the same all over again. A game looking to increase the social aspect of their wares should look to this third of interaction- repeatedly seeing the same people over and over again. Interestingly, back in the early days of multiplayer the constraints made this better- you had to pick a server to play on one your own, and there was generally only a dozen or so with great latency for your computer. You got to know the user names of people playing there, and technical limitations kept everything human scale (16-32 players at a time, so maybe a couple hundred regular players at most.)