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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

There was a competitiveness to it, but it was a fun friendly competitiveness. The kind of competitiveness you have when you go bowling with friends, or play poker. You're trying your hardest to win, sure, but also: it's just fun with friends.

These days "play online" so often means "play with complete strangers you've never talked to before and most likely never will again".

Even for large popular games like Unreal Tournament you typically joined a set of favourite servers, and had the same set of "regulars" hanging around.

It's like old-school relatively small-scale forums vs. reddit or Twitter.

You can still kind-of get this experience if you try hard enough, but it's not really the default and typically nothing is geared towards it.

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The thing is that most people who want a more casual multiplayer experience now just have their own servers or play in some other setting where it's easy to just play with your friends and nobody else. They'll play on a private Valheim/Minecraft server, or party up in Warzone or Fortnite, or play a private Civ game hosted p2p, or just visit each other in Animal Crossing. I think in general this is where Gen-Z is moving: less engagement with open platforms, more with private ones. That is why Discord is such a big deal as well. The problem with the current state of the internet is that if you let just anyone in you have to deal with trolls, or bots, or scammers, or incels, or whatever, and nobody wants to deal with that. Even on public chess servers you'll get like five messages a month saying "your opponent was cheating, sorry about that," who actually wants to talk to randos these days?

Back in late 90s that level of competitiveness was there, but was relegated to clans / guilds. Algorithmic match play changed all that because casual play no longer allowed regulars to get to know each other. It made casual competitiveness possible and together with popularity / normalization, many things changed.

As an aside I miss the old days, but i also found grinding overwatch and eventually leveling up in my mid 30s (pre kids) to be incredibly enjoyable and rewarding in spite of the unmanaged toxicity. I don't have any competitive gamer friends and the match play i dislike also made it possible to experience something i think i would not otherwise have had access to.

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