For Men Who Hate Talking on the Phone, Games Keep Friendships Alive | Hacker News Reader

For Men Who Hate Talking on the Phone, Games Keep Friendships Alive

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259 pointswallflower102 comments

As for many things, there's a nice Knausgaard quote about this:

> That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence.

I'm a guy and I like phone calls to friends, but I let them wander organically with little pressure. Of course, my friends and I have lives where it's not a big deal to set aside an hour or two for meandering conversation, and not everybody does. But wandering conversation is such a high-utility activity for me that I'm happy to do so. At any rate, it beats watching Netflix or whatever by a mile -- I remain confused by how many people say they have no time for friends but also consume a bunch of solo entertainment. I guess if your free time comes in unpredictably scheduled half hour blocks it might simultaneously be hard to plan hangouts and easy to watch TV, but I don't think most people have that kind of life, outside of maybe certain sets of parents of young children?

The quote is very interesting but I'd add something. Most of our dreads started after teenagehood, when social bonding was of high importance. Yet it often becomes a diplomatic effort, often void of real emotion. Real is too strong, but it's not vibrant nor fun most of the time. It's smalltalk. And we keep at it because as an adult it's deemed very important, even though, younger, relationships didn't center around mild chat, it was about having fun, cracking jokes, sharing a childish venture, getting something happy about the interaction.

ps: ah well, universe is poking fun at me, a very old friend just sent me a text after many months :)

Call them back!

I texted right away, with jokes.

Off topic, but seeing as you seem to have read some: where should one start with Knausgaard? I've been hearing more and more about him, and want to get a taste, but don't know where to start.

I think Volume 1 of My Struggle is a good starting point. That series sounds intimidating -- six volumes averaging maybe 500 pages, written by a gloomy-looking Scandinavian, with an ominous and provocative title -- but Knausgaard is crazy readable. And the first book immediately gets to work showing you how, what, and why he writes.

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.

But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.

This was common knowledge until we had a generation will cell phones which greatly reduced the amount of informal regularly scheduled events. In large part because coordination is not nearly as difficult so there is less push to just set something up that occurs once every two weeks as opposed to jus doing it last minute via group chat.

Or weekly/frequent religious community gatherings.

People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect.

For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall.

I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.

A comment that sounded sincere was deleted while I responded to it.

Quick answer: I mentioned a religious congregation because I thought it wasn't well-known in HN circles.

My intent was actually to use this as an opportunity to try to explain something I know about some complicated group. All of us fellow humans have so much misunderstanding between so many groups, contributing to conflict and disrespect, often for no good reason.

(For example, religious/cultural congregations aren't just about doctrine and dogma passed down from parents -- or often aren't even about that at all, for many people -- but are often things that people are in for reasons we can maybe appreciate and understand. Then we can address actual problems better, together.)

I'm the opposite of religious, and there's no doubt that the political strength (and happiness, and comfort) of religious groups lies almost completely in the fact that they meet regularly at a dedicated meeting facility, and this while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group. The group is also expected to favor its members, and to provide mutual aid, and as the group increases in size, that mutual aid is often delivered in a form mutually beneficial to the helper and the helped e.g. one member needs work, another member needs a worker they can trust.

Many/most religious people have a very loose idea of the orthodoxies of their own religions, but they know everything about what's going on at their church, and in the lives of other people who attend it. Secular traditions can't really survive over the long term without designing similar structures.

I doubt that individualist ideologies can do this at all, because they tend to feel that obligation without contract is not a thing, and even that the strength of obligation with contract is directly related to the ability to enforce that contract.

I think it's hard for no religious institutions to form cohesive groups because they don't have a commonly-held value structure. Indeed once you start to impose values on group members then for all intents and purposes you become quasi-religious because there's no materially bound "value-driven particles" or similar physical structure to values.

There are plenty of secular groups that have cohesion (either between entire family units or between people without the rest of their family): non-religious scouting organizations, hiking groups, various volunteer groups, some political groups, gaming "clans", fan clubs, neighborhood groups... All of them are easy to join and leave and have churn, just like churches do when people move in or out of their region.

any group that has a common goal will work here.

Linux User Groups, scouts, you name it. none of these groups would stay together without a common value structure. religion is nothing special here.

any religious group that considers your occasional absence as a crisis is a group i'd stay away from. but fortunately not all religious groups are like that. if anything, for things like scouting and sports groups, or any kind of group where you learn something together it is more important that members attend regularly.

>>while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group.

>any religious group that considers your occasional absence as a crisis is a group i'd stay away from.

Indeed, which is probably why the poster you're responding to specifically made the point about consistent absence (not occasional absence) and it being a mild crisis.

Most religious communities I've observed are also quite lax about what qualifies as an excuse. For example, any sort of travel (be it vacation, visiting family, going on a business trip, or traveling with the team for little Jimmy's soccer tournament), seems to be accepted as valid excuse. So are other institutional commitments, provided that they don't become regular/recurring reasons for missing religious attendance. "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.

Furthermore, having your absence declared to be a "mild crisis" for the group is not necessarily a bad thing: certain excuses like being sick (or caring for a sick family member) are likely to draw the support of the group; if you're in a small religious community where people hold each other accountable for religious attendance, there's a decent chance that if members of your church know that you missed Sunday service due to being ill or pregnant or recovering from surgery (or caring for a family member who is any of the above), some of them will stop by later in the afternoon (or later in the week) to drop off a home-cooked meal or some other sort of care package.

(I understand that some people might prefer to deal with their health situation in private without having a community of people who take it upon themselves to offer support, and I've always been one to appreciate the benefits of solitude and privacy, but in contemporary society I feel like we may have veered too far in the direction of isolation and atomization.)

>if anything, for things like scouting and sports groups, or any kind of group where you learn something together it is more important that members attend regularly.

Many religious practices involve a service that involves teaching (for example, a "sermon" that is delivered to a congregation by a preacher), so for many people, religious attendance falls into the category of "group where you learn something together." Indeed, I've observed it's common for many churches to have weekly sermons that are part of a "series," offering a sort of week-to-week continuity as they provide a deep exploration of a single topic over the course of a month, so if you miss a single service you might perhaps be inclined to ask a friend what was covered in the sermon later in the week when you meet them at something like a Wednesday Bible study or a Tuesday morning prayer group.

> * "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.*

that's when i'd start getting worried. anything that puts pressure on the individual is not healthy. the initiative always needs to come from the individual, not from the community.

if someone wants to attend but it is somehow difficult (transportation, time, staying up late the night before (for whatever reason)) then the community may help find a solution, but it may not pressure the individual into changing.

the responsibility of a religious community is to support its members, not the other way around. if your community is not doing that, i'd look for one that does.

i may got hung up on the term "crisis for the group". for me crisis means that the person or group has a problem within itself.

an individual may have a crisis that prevents that person from attending. then it's up to the group to help and resolve that crisis. but the group should not have a crisis all by itself just because that person is missing. (unless maybe the missing person has the keys to the meetingplace, sure that's a crisis for the group, but mere non-attendance isn't)

even prolonged absence should not lead to a crisis. at best someone tries to check on them once and see if they are fine and find out the reason for non-attendance. if it's something the group can fix, they should look into that, but if it's that persons choice, they should leave them alone.

This is a really good point, and one that I think a lot of non-religious people don't get. Organized religion is first and foremost a community. It's friends and neighbors being kind to each other. It can turn toxic when that community is used to abuse people, impose bigotry, and demand blind loyalty. But that's not fundamental to the concept, and indeed many religious people and church groups don't do that. I grew up in a very tolerant, progressive Episcopalian family, for example. As a teen I went to a summer church camp where the theme for the entire week was sex and how to approach it with tolerance and wisdom.

If you want to understand and guard against the awful parts of religion, you need to understand the good parts that make people participate in the first place.

Can second. I grew up in a Protestant Church like this, and it's a great community. Nice and welcoming people are sometimes rare these days.

I can't help but think that it's just not "cool" to be religious. It's seen as things our parents did, and every one wants to be an edgy atheist. For better or for worse, humans drew community from their churches (or other religious institutions) for a very long time. Churches were uniquely well-suited to "scale" with modern life and urbanization, especially compared to other traditional communities. I'm not saying you have to be any specific religion; I'm guessing many other religions are welcoming as well. But pick something where you can find a community of friendly people who share your values (this is possibly most important).

Edit: I see that the parent comment has now felt compelled to apologize for suggesting that religion could be a good thing. That's pretty sad. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing for others. Quite frankly, I also believe it's helpful for mental health. Believing that when you die you will just disappear is a rather depressing worldview, and I know people with serious health issues who are atheists and are struggling with that. Same with many aging people. On the other hand, being able to "offer something up to God" can be quite cathartic and an excellent way to relive stress.

Priests were the therapists of olden days.

Edit 2: For further clarification, here's my response to those who say "just gather like-minded people". It's much harder to do that without religion. The best definition of religion I ever heard was "an ideology that provides a comprehensive worldview". In other words, something that shapes your perspective on and understanding of every thing else. It is not easy to find such a group of people who share such basic understandings and values without the use of religion.

Religion combines two things and some people only want one: opportunity to socialize and build friendships with people who share values; and a belief in supernatural actors.

I think the problem with this is that one of those values has to be to consistently attend the meeting. Supernaturalism offers this. Video games rely on consistently being entertained by video games; once it's not fun, you can just leave.

Well for one, not every religion purports an afterlife. Where I quibble though is for two notions. 1: I think the perspective of those either denying or being apathetic about the possibility of an afterlife is in fact life-affirming. Hume is like this for instance. One has to seize it while it lasts; this is not contingent on there being an afterlife. Whether you think there's an afterlife or not, life ends. The stoics and Buddhists and the like opt to navigate with an emphasis on self-mastery and acceptance of that which is out of control. If we're comparing anecdotes, I don't recognize them to be a depressive bunch. And 2: I expect the comfort of religion is far less so about an afterlife than the gamification of life, winning spirit "points", borrowing pre-cut meaning espoused from dogma to relieve the depression of a toiling, dull life. But it needn't be so. I think meaning is a personal responsibility, and not everyone has the wherewithal to decide it for themselves. That's a task. There's nothing inherently depressing about not knowing what happens when we die - it's misdirection, depression is about life itself. I am a happy atheist.

>Believing that when you die you will just disappear is a rather depressing worldview, and I know people with serious health issues who are atheists and are struggling with that.

True, the issue is I can't just decide to believe that magic exists and tomorrow I will believe it as a fact without any doubts, IMO it would be great if I could believe, I would know that justice exists and if I do good then I will b rewarded, but wishing to believe is not enough for some people that for some reason think more critically.

I am not against religion and I would never attempt to "convert" someone to atheism, if someone is happy with his religion and it is not pushing it on me then I am happy for them.

The more I look at it most of what is called science is just as magical when you move outside of the directly observable.

Take the big bang, people proclaim that it answers the question of where the universe comes from but it does no better of a job than religion. Both start from a place of preexistence, either god or the energy required to create the universe exist prior to the start of the explanation. Neither actually answer the question.

It is supreme arrogance to assume we have it right and all the ones before us had it wrong. Truth is we have no idea about much of anything, especially the universe or ourselves and it's all essentially blind faith.

Scientific consensus is just the new papal decree.

Let me tell you my main point, and it is not related with science or who created the universe. Most religions(I am a ortodox christian in Romania) tell that God is good and fair, I look around me and I do not see a fair and good world, so using my own intelect I decide that there are 2 possibilities:

1 a fair and kind god does not exist ( a healthy in the mind human won't let children die)

2 god exists but and his actions or inactions are not on my liking, I can't respect and worship such a god.

Now some religios people will appear and tell stories about how we can't understand why god does X but it never convinces me. Again is not about science, I can ignore the creationists stories as just stories, the full God is kind and fair is what makes me convinced that there is nothing like this in this world.

What if there's a third possibility?

Can you tell me? Something like I am too stupid to understand why the bad things happen? How kindly god lets children die when any human would do better? Sorry I won't worhip a god that is inhuman.

"Free will" is the possibility I was thinking about. Basically that God has relinquished control over a lot of things so that we can have a true free will. That means that our actions must have irreversible consequences.

I accounted for this, if God exists but he is just watching like a scientists watches ants then for me is not a good/kind god, a father so I can't respect and worship that.

I am thinking at a story in the Bible where God and the Devil discuss about a guy (not sure his english name, it is named Iov in my language) and God agrees to test the guy and kills his children, Iov continues to worship God and at the end God gives him other children, for me children are not like objects, you kill them to test my reactions and if I pass you give me other children or other reward, for me this shows a God that has no empathy or humanity, maybe I am too low level to understand the superior plan but you have Judas that should have seen miracles daily and he lost his faith, how you expect someone that never sees any miracle, that sees the world how unfair it is to believe (considering the most priests still try to convince you that the wold is only 5000 years old and tons of other crap in the Old Testament)

I don't think that free will means that God watches detached like a scientist.

The first story you recount is about Job. My personal take about Job is that the story about God and the Devil is an explanation for why bad things happen to good people, i.e. one of the consequences of free will means that Karma doesn't work. Sure God let it happen to Job but not because He was in cahoot with the Devil but because of free will.

The second story about Judas, I don't think it's true that he lost his faith. I think either Judas was plain greedy or more likely he saw all those miracles and thought that by turning Jesus over to the Jewish leaders he would force Jesus' hand to use His power to overthrow the Roman government and let Jews rule their own kingdom with Jesus as king.

> considering the most priests still try to convince you that the wold is only 5000 years old

I agree with you here. My personal ideology is to always follow the truth with an open mind and not be afraid of where that leads me. Some say that religion is truth but I don't see it as a tautology. Even a religion needs to prove its claims of the truth.

Not sure I buy your Judas story, if he believed then he was stupid to sell God. You also have the other disciple Thomas (sorry I am not sure the right name translation) he also did not believe that Jesus could have reviewed, so again a person that knew Jesus in person did not believe in him how should I that I only see the unfair world and the Bible that is full of historical mistakes presented as truth,

Anyway my problem is that I had faith when I was young, I was brainwashed with this religious stories and I even wanted to become a priest , but I lost the faith, I can't believe, I read the Bible and I seen the world, maybe only f I see a miracle or see a devil or ghost I could have some doubts that there are supra natural things. (coincidentally when I was young I was also believing in ghosts, vampires witches )

How would you find the truth about God, let's consider that from the 10+ major religion neither is the correct one, do you try to find something that is common in all religions, or only in major ones? If you believe there is a God is there also a Devil that is all the time tricking you and you need to be paranoid and question everything?

Do you believe? do you have no doubts? Do you try to think about those doubts or you attempt to push the thoughts away so you don't upset God that you are considering what if he does not exists or what if your religion is the wrong one, really bad one.

> Do you believe? do you have no doubts? Do you try to think about those doubts or you attempt to push the thoughts away so you don't upset God that you are considering what if he does not exists or what if your religion is the wrong one, really bad one.

Honestly I'm not sure what I believe. I lean towards believing in a God but I'm full of doubt about the essence of God. I was brought up in a Christian home and like you really religious when a kid. We had a "high ceiling" both at home and in the church, encouraging individual thinking and discussion so I never felt brainwashed. If there is a God I think He/She is greater than any religion can encompass, so there may be strands of truth in many religions.

I don't worry so much over having the correct faith (IMHO any God worth their salt would not condemn a man based on things unknowable) as about the consequences of my actions (or in-actions). So for me, any religion that encourages its followers to do good things to other people, and not bad things to other people seems like it can't be really bad (it can still be practiced badly..). Following the teachings of Jesus then seems like a good idea ("Love thy neighbor...Do unto others... etc"). Unfortunately, while a lot of Christians do that, a lot of them don't.

While I tend to believe myself to be quite rational, I still prefer to keep an open mind about these things. If you've read C.S Lewis "The magicians nephew", there's a part in the book where all the animals start talking, but the magician only hears growls and animalistic sounds because he has convinced himself that it simply cannot be that the animals speak. That's my greatest fear, that I've closed my mind to possibilities outside of my very limited comprehension.

[edit]

> Not sure I buy your Judas story, if he believed then he was stupid to sell God.

I'm not sure I think Judas believed Jesus was God, I think Judas may have believed him to be the Messiah, who many Jewish groups had differing ideas about. Some believed the Messiah would be an earthly king, and I believe that Judas may have been one of those people.

Sometimes that irreversible consequence is genocide which by definition has a lot of people with extremely limited possibility to exercise that free will. Like having choice between suicide and being killed for no own fault. Or just killed full stop.

And it is not like genocide would be only example, just extremely easy one.

In simolar situation, when boss or company just let's people to do whatever and then laws get broken, people harass each other and children bully each other, we blame teachers and bosses and parents.

You can't play reaponsible father while letting children bully sibling. Not even in kids adulthood.

Those are all consequences of people opting to use their free will maliciously.

Not letting a child bully a sibling means imposing a limit on said first child's free will. In most societies that is considered a good thing so even if we value our children's free will, we will limit it if they hurt someone else. Most people would agree that limiting a child's free will in such cases is a good thing to do, yet it does limit free will.

There are lot of non human terrible things happening, like viruses or earth-quakes, this is not a free will thing, do we blame the devil? or do we blame the humans and say that God is teaching them a lesson, or we say that the people that suffered will get rewarded in the after life and we don't even try to explain the nature because God knows better.

I dislike the fact that if something good happens is God fault, he made a miracle, if something bad happens we find someone else to blame.

I have yet to see someone give a definition of free will that is both logically consistent and not just a veneer over sufficiently complex behaviours where there ultimately is no agency.

Scientific consensus is just the new papal decree.

We have been to the bottom of the ocean and orbited the globe. We have put people on the moon and robots on Mars. We have sent probes beyond the far reaches of the solar system and we have peered into the depths of the universe.

All of these things we've done, not with arrogance, but with humility. The central scientific principle is that we are fallible creatures who have no privileged access to the truth. Only through the hard work of experimentation and repetition can we build any semblance of a model for reality.

And yet we maintain that "all models are wrong, some are useful." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

   and it's all essentially blind faith.

This just really isn't true.

I do think there is a problem with something I'll call "science-ism", which involves people picking and choosing from "science" to support a position or worldview they have, without any critical thinking involved. And to some degree, in some populations this unquestioned adherence to a vaguely claimed result from "science" has replaced a unquestioned andherence to one taken from "religion".

But that is not what science is. Science, for all of its flaws and challenges, is simply the best systemic approach for understanding the world around us that human beings have ever come up with. It's not even a close contest. It isn't perfect. It makes errors and is too slow to correct them. There are interesting a meaningful questions it can't really address. It is hard work to do well. But it does work - and has led to most of the large improvements in human lives that we've seen in centuries, at least. And it does that work by being the opposite of what you claim. Understanding that we too have it wrong, that we are building on the work of those who came before, and we are iteratively building a better understanding.

Your comment about cosmology is telling. The ideas behind the big bang theory are categorically different than religious cosmology. Consider two things 1) They didn't come from "just" and idea, they were arrived at by trying to understand the implications of the models we saw agreeing very, very well with observed physics. 2) If a better explanation comes along, physics will (begrudgingly perhaps, and slowly perhaps) adopt it and throw out the big bang theory.

Yup, that's a regularly scheduled recurring event, alright.

Disclaimer: I grew up in that environment, community Catholic, and am now an atheist.

I never enjoyed the Sunday gatherings, I was an angry child, but leaving it does give me perspective on why people stay. It gives you a real sense of community that most people I know don't have. It connects you with people, hell my family wouldn't have any friends without their parish. Religion, specifically Catholicism, has a lot of problems, but their are legitimate reasons why the vast majority of people hold onto them.

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.

That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.

This also highlights why church or other community events are so hard to leave. All religious nonsense aside, this creates a space for people to just hang out and get some socializing in, create lasting relationships.

Also explains why it is so hard to leave a game. You're not leaving a game, you're leaving the community you've been playing with. This is why org nights are so important, its how you get together on a schedule.

This is also why it is better to be in an event that everyone in the family can participate in, since it is so important for you not to miss.

> But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.

The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time...

The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events.

Or somebody willing to go the extra mile and gather everyone regularly.

I have such a person in my circle of friends from college - he organizes get-togethers which include me even though I've been out of town since 2015.

Given the distance I usually vodkonference.

I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it.

Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.

One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.

Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.

I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.

This seemed very artificial to me, until I realised we had this recurring event to an extreme degree earlier in life - it was just called school.

I was playing a Moba with my brother almost every day, talking on voice while we played. I had to quit because the Moba was really sucking up all my drive and free time, but after quitting, I really missed talking with my brother. I started playing again for that reason, but had to quit again, because in the year and a half I was playing that game, I really got nothing done other than have lots of fun and piss off my wife. Of course I never call my brother on the phone otherwise, I have no reason to. I have a really hard time finding a middle ground, but the social aspect of gaming is definitely one of the strong positives for me.

Why not agree to play once or twice a week? For example, every Monday night, you two jump on for a few hours and play and catch up?

Also, what do you mean you got nothing done? You bonded with your brother. That seems pretty valuable to me!

I am not him, but for me "nothing done" in similar situation meant that I did not learned new programming related things despite needing to, did not contributed to household chores as much as I should, deteriorated/neglected relationships with people actually around me and nearby, personal projects did not moved and stuff I was supposed to organize was not organized.

A lot of these games are designed in a way that makes them less fun when played only a little. Or you become a drag on the team. There are also long term quests and you need to be present to participate.

An explocite agreement on playing twice a week breaks "plausible deniality" here. For some reason it is hard to admit that we are doing it for social reasons. It would be like calling brother on the phone directly - the same block preventing you one action prevents the other.

>A lot of these games are designed in a way that makes them less fun when played only a little. Or you become a drag on the team. There are also long term quests and you need to be present to participate.

I think the solution to this is to find games that don’t do that

I agree, absolutely. Clash royale and other mobile ganes was that solution for me. The problem is when you joined to be with people (brother in this case), but don't want to admit it out loud or that person primary is there for game.

Not him but for me gaming has really sapped my attention span and intrinsic motivations. Before or after a "session" I find myself still thinking about the game and my brain still wired to play the game, versus the other sorts of "zones" you can find yourself in such as to exercise, read, meditate, cook, do errands, etc. I go back and forth on playing games (1 month on, 3 months off ish) - but its always quitting cold turkey. There is probably a business venture in keeping people productively busy in order to get over a gaming fetish.

This is a wholesome version of that new Black Mirror episode. The one with the polar bear. I will say no more.

Chatting can be difficult for men. As a man, we tend to not make points about chatting about our feelings or life. But, when our goal is video games / bowling / watching a football game / whatever else with downtime, well, the feelings or life conversations aren't our focus then. Loophole! (not to mention sometimes serious conversations can cause awkward silences. Everyone has the activity to turn back to.)

It can also be boring and annoying to talk about politics, the weather, or to gossip about people not present. Video games, like sports, offer a very detailed, completely trivial subject to talk about. Additionally, silence while watching or playing a game isn't dead (like silences at the holiday dinner table), it's a steady stream of new conversational material.

I made true friends through Ventrilo/TeamSpeak and different games (but mostly Counter-Strike). I’ve never made a phone call to a friend unless truly necessary but I’ve spent several hours talking through these.

Nowadays with Discord it’s just so much easier and fun for everyone. I’m happy that it was invented and just wish it was open-source but oh well.

What is wrong with Mumble? https://www.mumble.com/

discords communities make it more powerful than almost any site/service save maybe for irc at its peak

if you’re early 20s or younger everyones on discord, even if you dont game. its a general group messaging platform

Lack of users in my experience. The people on mumble tend to be the 'old guard' or people who have been playing MMOs or online games since 90s/early 00s. But all of my friends or new people I've met are all on Discord only

Discord won the bigger marketshare due to being accessible from a browser and featureful. And it's a market where marketshare winner takes all, because of the need to exchange contact information with someone you just met on a platform you share.

My high school/college friends and I (we've been out of school for nearly 15 years at this point) moved to Discord from Mumble. Here were our reasons why:

* persistent text chat - we're spread across different time zones, and the ability to talk separated by time without having to resort to a forum is very nice, pinging someone with a question or with a reminder for our next game and anime night is really nice; having a separate space from group SMS (which we don't really use) is nice because when I'm at work I can log out of Discord and not be bothered, and if I get an SMS I know that it's something that I have to deal with now

* consistent interface across mobile and desktop - it's nice to have a consistent, universal interface across desktop (Mac, Linux, Windows) and mobile (iOS and Android) versions; it's nice that there are multiple apps for Mumble, but that makes support more difficult

* built in screen sharing support - see support note above

* channel permissions - we have subgroups based on interest, listed in an announce channel, and people that want to join in on that discussion can, but people who are uninterested in, say, Warhammer, discussion don't even have that channel cluttering up their interface, nor do they have to explicitly mute it

* push notifications - see ping above, it's nice

* better bot integration - for me, anyway, it's easier to integrate bots into Discord than it is for Mumble - this is subjective

Those are just the reasons I could think of off the top of my head. I would love to be able to self-host our Discord server, and if it had existed at the level of maturity that it is at now, I probably would have suggested moving to Matrix or something similar.

>Like others his age, Gill says that his close friendships from high school and college have atrophied, not only because of the distance but because of their mutual aversion to talking on the phone.

I'll take the liberty to illustrate my own experience: my number of friendships and acquaintances has incredibly declined not because of any personal aversion to voicecalls, but to texting and social media.

I've noticed how, gradually, people I'm frequently around have grown more and more reluctant not only to pick up a phone call but also--and more importantly--to engage in face-to-face interaction, something I find absolutely essential to fulfill one's social needs to a deeply satisfying extent. Not having an online, public presence makes you irrelevant to a lot of people. In some countries, for example, not using WhatsApp is plain social suicide.

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but I guess I have the opposite experience. With phonecalls I had issues because I have serious tinnitus and have had that since I was young (played in metal bands and was a real man so no earplugs...). Since chatting became normal I made more solid friendships then I ever did in person and definitely then on the phone. I chat like we are sitting together which people find akward at first but then they seem to like it. It is not very different after a while if it is face to face vs writing 1000s of lines of text in some chat client. And the conversations are usually more profound; no noise, no drinking and time to ponder answers and questions.

Face to face I personally still prefer but I notice my younger friends do not and that is fine.

I have been making (and losing them as well; especially the ones I made in my teens: we have nothing at all in common anymore mostly) real friends (as in people that click fast and you talk with day and night if the opportunity is there) over 30 and over 40; those were met online via sideprojects, company buys and sells and some of them I have never met.

> no noise, no drinking

I strongly recommend casual wandering walks for anyone without mobility issues as a bar replacement. I don't even remember where I picked up the habit, but I never was really introduced to bars until later, and they always seemed inferior and have shown a few of my friends the benefits of walking around outside and having a chat (sobriety optional).

I definitely second this! Talking while walking with one other person lets you focus on the actual talking without distractions. Other people butting in and interrupting is no longer an issue. Things like eye-contact-management, what-to-do-with-my-hands-management becomes unnecessary, you can simply shutdown those parts of your brain and focus on the conversation at hand.

These days, when I meet friends face to face, it is on long walks in nature or the city; we hardly ever sit down. The bar/party thing was referring to what most people around here prefer when meeting ‘friends’ (close personal acquaintances) so it is hard to break that if people are stuck in that. Especially for people who have fulltime jobs, around here, outside the job you either vacation with the family or are in a bar.

Not sure if it is something I picked up from my dad but I hardly chat to friends I have made over the years. As I have grown older I have gotten closer to my family including extended family. When I do meet with my friends we kick off as if we last saw each other yesterday yet sometimes it is a good 5,10 or even 15 years since we last met. The older I get the more memories I seem to have that include my family so I just focus on them. Not to say I don't talk to other people but I make way more effort and it seems much easier to talk to family. Maybe it is an African thing most of us are big on extended family. My uncle is a good 15 years older than me. Growing up he was an adult now we both adults so we can converse on the same level. Same with my dad.

Nah you just described me and my father to an extent. There are variables, but what you described really sounded familiar. And my dad’s side is Scottish.

My mom is more social and cognizant if social needs (Irish). Though less so now that they’re getting older/retired.

I’m not sure how well it mixes with the norms of Canadian society here. Often feels a touch off-centre but not entirely out of place.

So maybe more a trait of people who just tend toward family over other social connections, and less a heritage thing?

Thanks for sharing. Within the extended family different people grow into different roles. You have the aunt who everyone confides in she always tells you as it is whether you want to hear it or not. But since you know it is coming from a place of love its all good. In your 20s you do all the running around. Slaughtering whatever animal needs to be slaughtered. In your 30 and 40s you the ones that make sure things move. You help organise weddings, family meetups, funerals and so on. All these occasions tend to be big back home. Then you transition into a senior role where you act as an advisor to the 30 year olds organising everything. Finally when you are grandmother/father age you just an honoured guest who can do whatever they want :-). You become the joker, family historian ... whatever you want really.

Interesting, I've never thought about this but it matches my recent experience.

Friendship as an adult has been about shared interests, not being assigned to the same class or living nearby, so it makes sense.

Totally. I didn't think about that ever but it's true.

Aversion to the phone calls doesn't appear when talking to other in VoIP chats when playing online games.

Cool thought.

Why is that though?

Does someone like Trello have a discord-to-POTS bridge?

>Friendship as an adult has been about shared interests, not being assigned to the same class or living nearby,

Hits too close to home there.

Kids change it too. It's hard not to make friends when you see the same parents a couple times a week at soccer or baseball or swimming, year-after-year. There's a lot of downtime and you around people that you have something in common with.

With both of our kids we had a great social life with groups of the other parents all through school. There were annual dances, fetes, mums nights out, dads nights out, meeting for a quick beer etc. etc. Now the kids have left school the majority of that has dropped off, we do keep in good social contact with a couple of people but I really miss how busy and varied the social life used to be.

I’ve seen this with my kids and their school friends when they play online together. They chat and encourage each other, its really sweet and completely different to their off line rough and tumble play. I wake up on the weekends to quiet whispers of “sick play, dude.”

What ages are your kids / what games do they play (as a father of three i want to encourage the good stuff / discourage the bad)

10 and 7, although the 7 year old plays with the 10 year olds online.

They play minecraft, fortnite, brawlhalla, titanfall 2 ... mostly. They play in the lounge with us watching (I'll youtube while they play) and any game that is a 15, group chat is off.

We are on PS4 so you can turn game chat off and turn friend chat on in the PS4 friend settings.

There’s a buddy of mine who I stay in touch with by playing Chess on a mobile app. We’ve had a game going at all times for probably 4 years now with a 3 day time limit on moves.

He’s a lot better than me. Overall record is something like 200-50, but it’s a simple way to keep in touch.

Other than that, all of my friends of college stay in touch because of college football. We all follow the team, get together at different away games and bowl games. Home games are actually tougher because most people come with a family routine for those.

I second this... One of my best friends moved to another country, and we regularly talk on VOIP during console games.

Hell, sometimes we talk for an hour and never even manage to start the game...

Having just watched the "Striking Vipers" Black Mirror episode, it was mildly frustrating watching men do everything but talk...

I don't know what you mean by frustrating. For a Black Mirror episode, it had such a happy ending!

Yeah, maybe I've spent too much time on r/sex and r/relationships. The answer is always communication! It's just surprising to me that someone could be in a relationship for 10+ years and not communicate everything, no matter how embarrassing or intimate.

First thing that popped in my head when I read the headline. Really liked the episode.

I used to play WoW with a childhood friend on the other side of the country. Unlike MOBAs, I find that WoW is (or at least was during BC and WotLK) are mindless enough that you can actually hold a real conversation.

How’s the sound quality of these gaming systems?

I hate talking on phones more than ever because rectangular “candybar” smartphones aren’t a good fit for a face, and the audio quality is terrible. I have to keep saying “What did you say?”

Of course I prefer meeting in person, and ideally in a place that isn’t pumping in music. It’s the only way to hold an actual conversation.

Sound quality and audio codec compression of these services (Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo) is generally quite good, they are designed to support rapid coordination of large groups in high intensity situations and e-sports tournaments. It was not uncommon to have 40+ people in a single voice channel for MMO raids 10 years ago, and things have only improved since then. However, your experience will be significantly affected by your choice of headset and microphone. I have spent a lot of time in voice channels and it's common to have long conversations among groups of friends or online acquaintances there.

Sound quality is perfectly fine. When it's not, it's always because the other party has a crappy microphone or a crappy connection.

I just had a chat on mumble last night catching up with a collage friend who now lives back home in the middle east. It was totally fine and clear. I also had a chat with my mother over a cell phone, and she lives in another city in the same state, and that quality was way worse and actually dropped audio at one point. It's really kinda embarrassing how bad phones are at this point, relatively speaking.

With proper headphones, mic and a higher bitrate it is superior to phonecalls

For me, this is fantasy hockey. I don't even like to watch hockey anymore, but I enjoy the daily interaction with my friends who are no longer in the same city and busy with their own lives.

Man I can relate!

I met most of my closest friends in College and we graduated almost a decade ago and have ended up moving to different parts of the states but I keep in contact with most of them via a Discord server and play with some of them on a near daily basis.

It's really great since it feels like we are just hanging out in the dorm hall just shooting the shit.

That has been my experience. Friendships are best formed and maintained by working towards some mutual goal or at the very least regular interaction. In the absence of physical proximity games are pretty much the only recreational option.

It's funny how s05e01 of Black Mirror addressesthis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striking_Vipers

That’s probably a why the article was written.

And it really works. I can chat with my friends, talk during the game, but I'll never talk on the phone. Idk why, but it's nice to know that this is just not my way.

Why hasn't this caught on for watching TV together, online ?

A lot of people dislike talking while watching TV together.

FWIW, Xbox used to have this feature back in 2009-10. You could synchronize a video with up to 4 friends and watch Netflix or movies/tv from the Zune store with them over party chat in a virtual theater. The screen could be full screen or you could zoom out a bit and make your avatars emote while watching.

They discontinued the feature after a couple years saying it wasn’t very used.

It's socially unacceptable to talk over a movie or TV show, but welcomed when talking over videogames.

This probably has something to do with a movie/TV show is a ready-made story you mentally dive into while a multiplayer game session is a story that you create together. In the first case talking is disrupting while in the second it's part of the story.

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