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To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that

To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that seems to have gone away now. I guess they served as a proxy for what we now have with Discord, and now that we have "the real thing", its kind of naturally gone away. Which is a shame, because meeting people over Discord is much more difficult imo, or at very least not as beginner friendly.

jghn 4y ago
> As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends Some of us were past "kid" when UO came out :) But I do think the key phrase here is "as a kid". I was in university when UO came out, and it became my life. I had some strong social interactions with a bunch of people, although they tended to skew my age or older. However there was an obvious pattern. These were mostly people who did not have to take care children, either they hadn't had them yet for one reason or another, or their kids were already older. There was a bunch of us who stayed in touch and played other games, but as the main pack of late 20-something & early 30-somethings started to have kids, they faded off. This wasn't the only reason, other types of responsibilities pulled people away, but it was the big one. It's easy to sink time into things when you don't have huge time sink responsibilities in your life. And when you sink lots of time into social things, you tend to make strong connections.