Richard Lewis takes his weekly look at the true nature of what it is to be a gamer.

Read Richard's last column "The Cure For Gonzorreah"HERE

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

Whenever gaming comes under attack, one of the reflex defenses from those that wish to espouse the virtues of it – and quite conveniently – justify their lifestyle choices in the process – will typically point to one thing: human relationships. Yes, that’s right, let’s conveniently gloss over the fact that you are more likely to meet someone you would quite happily bludgeon to death through gaming than any other kind of person and let’s instead talk about the sheer joy of relationships that you forge with someone half way around the world while you ignore that awkward and difficult kid down the road who really needs a friend because you heard a rumour he may have wet himself in year 7…

The online gaming "nest"

The older generation will never get it, but that’s sort of understandable if you ask me. If you could step outside yourself and watch the way you were behaving you might not get it either. For a strong example of this voluntary lunacy I always defer to a piece by Jules Ritter, a fine blogger and the parent of one of our very own Cadred ranks. God only knows what she was thinking when she reported her son saying things like:

“Hot Dude 93 where are you? They’re shooting me, they’re shooting me!!! I need back up now. Martin get in here! Mint Boy where are YOU?! Where’s those grenades? I’m gonna die, it’s all your fault. Too late, I’m dead.”

Does make you wonder what server he was playing on... Talk about putting the camp in campers.

So yes, let’s celebrate the new tool of an enlightened age that is the internet and online gaming. It brings people together in such a way that only today it was declared four fifths of the world’s population belief access to the internet is a fundamental human right. The internet has become such a prevalent way of meeting people and maintaining relationships that for whole generations their pursuit of leisure takes place from their bedrooms. Signing up to a local football team is probably about as likely as someone signing up to a guild. And at the heart of all of this, the thing that normalises it and makes it understandable to the people that would ordinarily object, is the human element. After all, it’s not like it can be argued that it’s anti-social now, not like how it was for the one player obsessives.

Sure, there are relationships to be had in gaming, but how many are worth nurturing and cultivating? How many do you actually treat as possessing more humanity than the sprite or avatar you only ever see them as? How many people would actually own up to having forged a meaningful relationship through gaming anyway? I mean, for all we talk about how great it is to meet like minded people, the moment it comes down to admitting that some of these people may be your friends it’s suddenly abnormal. However, the evidence suggest that more and more people are building these relationships and they are becoming even more serious, some even forging online romances.

Has being single become so terrifying to women that this is now a viable target?

Take World of Warcraft players. Often maligned for being obese, jobless, socially inept nerds it turns out that they might so happen to be in the right place at the right time. A recent news article in The Times said that more women were actually starting to play WoW to land themselves a man. The article, electing to do the typical distillation of a broader issue with one human interest piece, focused on the love between “Jennifer” and her guild-mate “Nicky”:

“We spent every night sharing photos and talking on webcam. In time we grew closer and closer. We didn’t play WoW for the game any longer, but rather to be together. Both of us were scared of our feelings but one night we declared our love for each other.

We now have a cottage together and I have a lovely job. I’ve gained a new family, new friends and a loving boyfriend. It may be early days in terms of our relationship but 12 months on we’ve celebrated our first Christmas together and continue to find time for the friends we’ve made on WoW, who supported us through everything.”

I don’t know what’s more surprising – the fact that someone has developed this sort of relationship through online gaming, or the fact that WoW players are actually getting some. It casts a whole new light on the sausage-fest that is the FPS crowd that makes you actually wonder just what they’re all hiding. Not that they don’t forge relationships of their own, but they do tend to be of a more macho bent.

It’s kind of like all those weekend warriors that were too physically unfit to even get into the territorial army and spend their spare time running round the woods with bits of twigs in their hair playing paintball. “It’s dangerous it is… Never take your goggles off in the battlefield” they’ll bore you without prompting “One fella’s eyeball literally exploded” a story you’ll hear so often you wonder why there isn’t a foundation for these neo-cyclopic former paintballers. Yet somewhere out there between pretending to be soldiers and wiping the paint from their overalls they bond and a bromance is born.

And they talk about each other as if they were 'Nam vets too

The path to a true bromance is not one easy walked in a virtual world, but it can still happen. Those first tentative steps towards something akin to friendship will occur with the approval of being added to the friends list. From there playdates can be arranged – “next time you’re gaming maybe we could, you know, do it together” you say while looking at your shoes. When they go for it, where do you go from there? Don’t want to move in too fast – what if they’re not that type of gamer? No, in typically male fashion you must appear completely underwhelmed at the prospect of spending any sort of time together online, while at the same time maintaining enough contact to ensure it happens more often than not. And as time goes by you find yourself added to more and more methods of communication – including the all important patrol of Facebook to make sure the guy doesn’t look like a cannibalistic sex offender – and eventually you can proceed to the next stage: meeting in person.

Be thankful for LAN then, for it gives a pretext that doesn’t make it seem weird, an incredible feat if you consider that it is a group of people sat in a darkened room paying to do what they do from their own darkened room on a daily basis. But at least here there’s a genuine physicality to the whole thing that doesn’t make it seem artificial… Until it dawns on you that you’ve been forcing the whole thing and have not much in common with your team-mates. All you can do is try and keep that fake laughter rolling for the longest four days of your life while resolving to quit the team as soon as you’re out of the competition. In fact, it has been said that some teams have such a rotten first evening together that they deliberately crash out in the group stages just to get away from each other. Or at least that was the story according to various GEClan and Arm3d members.

In truth there are few genuine bromances forged from all that time spent together, but those that do come about are easily spotted. Some players will refuse to play without certain players in their team and will try and put this down to “we have a great understanding” rather than actually have to endure taunts if they just say something like “I just like the guy”. I mean, if you go that extra mile and start talking about liking each other it’s a slippery slope before you’re tagged up as Hot Dude 93 and Mint Boy, right? Respect to those pioneers then that aren’t afraid of risking such labels and stick together.

Some players and teams can pull of that genuine closeness that eludes others

What you mostly get from gaming are what is known in the trade as the “showmance” – you profess your undying love for each other at the few events where you cross paths, maybe seeing each other three times a year, before you go your separate ways again vowing at the end that you will make a better fist of keeping in touch. But the moment you’re free and clear you go back to the normal way of things, which is keeping a clear distinction between your gaming life and your “real” life – which is a phrase that is used recurringly by gamers everywhere, as if to underline the point that what you do in your downtime is actually no measure of who you are. Gamers quit recreational activities to focus on REAL life, when most sane people are trying to quit real life to have more time for recreation.

While I would say that the convention of the showmance is perfectly normal and understandable, it is there because there is a need to keep a level of separation between ourselves and all the other players. Think on it; we generally adopt a persona starting with a fake name that we think says something we’d like to be within the game perameters. Everyone we interact with refers to us by that name, or an abbreviated version reserved for the regulars. There’s no limitations of what people can say to each other something that, when coupled with the fact you’re never likely to meet 99% of the people saying it, leads to some fairly wild things being bandied about. Any piece of personal information becomes something else in the arsenal to use, guaranteed to be more effective than the generated bullets of an AK, or the fragmentation from a well placed grenade. It stands to reason then that we are never 100% ourselves and as such the showmance is about the best you can realistically hope for.

Credit to those who go looking for something and actually manage to find it, but online gaming is the wrong place to be searching for a meaningful human relationship. It always reminds me of my friend… Soon to be married, we took him on Stag weekend in Amsterdam and decided to get him a bit of ooh la la with one of the local “intercourse professionals”. He was a mild mannered chap and was completely unable to grasp the concept that these workers might say things designed to boost the old ego. As such, he became alarmingly besotted with one girl after just the allocated fifteen minutes. So much so he sat in a nearby coffee shop watching the other punters go into her booth, torturing himself over a relationship that didn’t exist. There was a look of sorrow in his eyes as we sat in the airport lobby as he mulled over going back to try and “rescue” her from the life she had chosen. Somehow, unknowingly, he had only gone and forged a bona fide ‘homance. It was without doubt one of the most wretched and depressing sights I have ever seen, but it is proof that not all human interactions require a relationship to come about as a result of them.

So sure, let parts of the media talk up the wonders of online relationships, in whatever form they might come about, but I think most of use know exactly where we are on this thing.

The Gamer might hunt in a pack, but he eats alone.