How Video Games Make You More Social

When people think of a gamer they usually think of a vampire-like person in the shelter of the dark avoiding all light and contact with society. This however is wrong and quite totally the opposite. "Compared with games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of emotions known as 'prosocial emotions'" (McGonigal 82) These prosocial emotions are feel-good emotions including love, compassion, and devotion. You get these emotions when playing games with your friends or family, they help to strengthen your relationships. I play Guild Wars 2 with my brother and this helps to build our relationship as spend time together in the game. When we aren't fighting we are bonding through video games. Along with my brother I have many other friends in the game and you can create a friends list to get notified when people log in so you can always play with someone.

This is the friends list in game that shows you who is on and where they are in the world.

Another example of how games build stronger bonds is in the game I play on my phone called Clash of Clans. Clash of Clans or "CoC" is a strategy game where you join a clan and raid other players bases while defending your own. I play this game with several other people from around the world including my close friends in an in-game clan (A clan is a group of people up to 50 that can donate troops and spells, chat, and attack in wars together). This helps to build my current social connections and make new ones with people I never knew before. All these connections help fuel the prosocial emotions that McGonigal talks about.

This is a picture of my base and my clan chat open where you can talk to your whole clan.

As well as direct connection McGonigal talks about ambient sociability. Ambient sociability is playing with others but not actively interacting with them, it is the idea of playing alone together. Players recognize each other because they can relate to what others are doing; their actions are meaningful to each other. (McGonigal 89-90) This is most commonly seen in MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online games) where you can have several players in the same area all trying to do the same thing such as killing a dragon or escorting a caravan. Nobody is really interacting directly with each other but everyone is helping to achieve the same goal and are looking towards the same rewards thus creating this "playing alone together" feel. Guild Wars 2 is an MMO and when I play I experience this ambient sociability. An example can be seen below where several players rallied together with me to defeat a world boss in order to get sweet loot.

This is the shadow behemoth world boss where tons of people gathered for the same cause, to kill it for loot

It all comes down to the fact that video games can help strengthen your social connections with friends and family as well as forge new ones. Whether you are directly communicating or not while playing video games you are actually being social and helping your social skills when it come to face-to-face interaction. Think about it after reading this post, how many people do you communicate with on a daily basis while playing video games? The answer may be surprising!


McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. Print.