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Has so far included content from Warsandpeas, Mr. Lovenstein, SMBC, Loading Artist, Low Quality Facts, nixCraft, ElleGray, and other interesting or provocative stuff I've random'd across on Mastodon.
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(title added for lemmy by mod)
Image description: 4 panel Loading Artist comic. 1: Blue guy stands behind Red guy playing a game on the couch "oh it's a SINGLE-PLAYER game?". 2: Blue guy scoffs "no thanks. Single-player games feel too lonely". 3: Blue guy puts on gamer headset "that's why I only play MULTIPLAYER games". 4: Blue guy happily at his PC, while tweaking his game settings Voice Chat: OFF, Text Chat: OFF, Friend Requests: OFF.
(Originally published earlier today on mastodon.world)
Nowhere does the comic say anything about trading, pings, or anything other than no voice chat, text chat, or friend requests. I don't know where you inferred that from.
I agree with the comic about how stupid the argument that multiplayer games are more meaningful is when people turn all that stuff off first thing; however, as a girl gamer, I turn off voice and text chat and friend requests immediately in a game because I don't need to be harassed while I just want to play a game. But there's plenty of other ways to interact with players.
Take Dark Souls, for example. Famous for its asynchronous message system, but lacking any voice or text chat when you're playing with other people. Your only forms of communication are any emotes or a handful of items that emit a stock phrase (like "hello" and "help me") that you might get during your playthrough, and your in-game actions. This has led to the common friendly Souls greeting of...spamming the L1 button to wiggle your weapon back and forth. Or if you walk up towards a corner and pull up your shield, people might infer that you're warning of an ambush around the corner.
Like seemingly everybody else in the world, I've been playing Helldivers 2 recently, and despite that game having a ping system, tagging of enemies and points of interest, stock phrases like "follow me," and emotes, the most common interactions I've had with people have involved players just randomly diving into each other and running around in circles.
Without language, people will always find ways to interact with each other. And just because you're not speaking with somebody doesn't mean that they're not enriching your gaming experience.
You are making other peoples experiences worse by forcing them to try and communicate with you in other means.
That time is going to cost them, you are ruining other peoples experiences when you do this.
Sure some people will put up with it, but there’s also a reason why most games are with new people. They bounce to get a better person to play with lmfao.
There is no meaningful interactions, only detrimental or people trying to make the best of a shitty situation. It’s not fun regardless.
Considering my experiences with in-game voice chat over the years, I think there's a reason I have yet to run into even a single person with it enabled in Helldivers 2. And it's not the poor quality that ingame voice chats usually have compared to dedicated programs like TeamSpeak and Discord.
I should correct myself and say that I've never turned text chat off in a game though. I can't actually say I've ever even seen that as something you can do. That's easy enough to ignore, or, like the text chat in Helldivers 2, is barely used by anybody.
You have an incredibly narrow idea of what constitutes communication and "meaningful interaction," to the point where it's clear that you're a guy who only plays a very particular type of game where voice communication is key, or you only play with friends. The majority of people play games with voice chat disabled because of how toxic gamers are. Hell, LoL had to disable text chat and make bad behavior a bannable offense because of how toxic their community was. Being an asshole gets you put into a queue that's only other assholes.
But go ahead and tell me how my and the rest of the team's experience is enriched by having to listen to a kid a third of my age scream into his mic about how he's going to face-fuck me for being a woman in a video game. I'm dying to know.