Tim slowed his old Ford as they reached a gulley, now full of water from the recent storms. He eased the pickup through the ditch and up the other side, being careful with the clutch as he hit the rough road on the other side. Next to him, Greg stared wide-eyed at his cup of coffee, moving it up and down to keep it from spilling and putting steam up on the windshield at the same time.
A joke came to Tim’s, mind, but he kept his lips closed and checked his phone. It was down to one bar. The sun was starting to threaten dawn ahead of them.
“Turnout is just up here,” Greg said. Then it’s only about click, mostly downhill.”
“I haven’t seen anything yet.”
“We may not. Mountain lions have been eating up the stock and there isn’t much to do about them.” Greg smiled, thinking of some old story. Tim could guess the one, but he said nothing else.
They reached the turnoff and Tim steered into it. It was nearly obscured by overgrown bushes and scrubby saplings, but the old reliable truck plowed through to the dirt road beyond. It twisted and turned, but as Greg said, they came up the end in less than a mile. Tim parked and stepped out. He zipped up his jacket against the morning cold and went to the bed, where he retrieved the rifle cases from where they sat within the camper shell.
He took out his phone. No bars. Smiling, Tim turned it off.
“Good idea,” Greg said, following suit with his own device. He took a deep breath and looked around. Bird song filled the air, including a loud mockingbird imitating a racoon in a strange cadence.
“Bird pretending to be a coon,” Tim said with a chuckle.
They took their rifles out and went through their familiar routines of checking the chambers and stashing their ammunition in their jacket pockets.
Tim took the caps off his scope and scanned the trees. “There’s the bastard.” He looked away. “Where did we put the stand? Did you even take it down last year?”
“It’s over here, by the creek,” Greg said. “And I never took it down. I come out to it just to sit sometimes.”
Tim followed Greg over a hillock to a set of oaks containing a prefab flat stand. They crawled up the ladder and sat down against the trunk of the tree, where they were slightly concealed by the drooping leaves of the tree. Greg took a pair of mugs and a large steel thermos out of his bag and poured two cups of black coffee. He handed one to Tim.
“So, heard any good jokes?”
Tim was silent for a few seconds in thought. “I don’t remember the last time I heard I joke and laughed. You?”
“I laugh at may kids’ jokes, but they aren’t really that funny. Just part of being dad, you know?”
Tim nodded. “I remember a few classics. That’s all I got now. I watched some guys on Netflix. Barely smiled. You reckon something is wrong with me?”
“I asked my pastor that. I never laugh. You think something is wrong with me?”
“What did he say?”
“He told me to go see a priest.”
Tim smiled. “Good think you didn’t ask him for financial advice. He’d have sent you to a rabbi. Yeah. So, a priest, a minister, and a rabbi find a million dollars.”
“I’ve heard this one. You want me to stop you?”
“You sure you heard it?”
“Whatever God wants, he keeps!” Greg laughed, and Tim joined him after a moment.
“Eh, you got a goyish kop. We should just tell the punchlines. Who’s writing new jokes?”
Greg smiled at him. “One of them already hatched and stole a bike!”
***
Recently, author Brian Niemeier wrote about the loss of “Third Spaces” in America, of which one was the venerable mall. Third spaces are those places of congregation that are not work or home: churches, taverns, restaurants, clubs, etc.
Third spaces have not just declined due to economics, but have been actively attacked, since in the 20th century many of these places were sex-segregated by default, whether it was a lodge or a knitting circle. One interesting thing to emerge from the early internet were third spaces of a virtual nature to fill this social gap. Originally it was forums and chat irc channels, but by the 2000s these virtual spaces included MMOs and gaming lobbies.
If you weren’t there, you might not realize how important these virtual spaces were for young men. By the early 2000s the academic space was completely converged with the ideological left. It was not only rude but academically suicidal to “be” a man in such spaces, to tell the sort of jokes men tell, to feel the feelings they feel, enjoy male-focused entertainment, and to care about what men care about.
Even then real life was horribly chaffing for any regular guy, but xbox live and World of Warcraft were “places” where one could cut loose, let his tongue wag, and have a few prohibited laughs. I won’t deny it is worse now, but it was bad back then, too. Chance are even your girlfriend couldn’t be trusted to know your inner thoughts; young men now might be surprised to find out that yes, at one point, you could actually speak your true mind to your significant other and not be in danger of being dumped. For most college men, dating impressionable college girls, that was already a far-flung memory, even in the year 2001.
For myself, I was 21 when WoW came out, but I had lost a large amount of “third space.” My friends and my usual hang, a bar called the Red Wave Inn, was closed for remodelling and expansion (and as it turned out, wouldn’t re-open for several years). We went to another bar to drink (a Tony Roma’s) but that closed, too (due to health code violations!). The dives were drying up. But WoW had come out, and it was really fun.
Not just that, it gave me something I didn’t realize had decayed over the last few years in the university system: honest connection with other people. Being anonymous (as everyone on the internet was back then) allowed us all to let loose and say the things we really felt, especially jokes that we just couldn’t get away with at work or school. While the world clamped down, the virtual space was a release valve.
WoW is an even better example because, being a virtual world, it’s virtual spaces were more real approximations than what we would get with social media. Players congregated in virtual spaces like Orgrimar and Ironforge because that was where other people were, and you needed to be near other players to do things like trade. Local chat was where, originally, you found other people to group up with, since most of the main content was group-oriented. You had to vet players. You got to know the people on your server, the guilds (on both factions), and the economy through those virtual spaces.
A WoW server was like a little city. It was a bunch of overlapping communities where people loved and hated each other, but somehow made it work. The communities felt more real than the real world because you were more often expressing your inner self due to the layer of anonymity that a character provided.
Xbox live and the play that occurred with Call of Duty wasn’t too different, other than it was perhaps more normie-centric. The old joke that you were only racist on Xbox live was true – it was a place where young men felt free to be vile and say whatever things were prohibited in “real” life.
The destruction of these spaces, due to both incompetence and malice, is therefore more important than it might seem on the outside, because like the mall shutting down, gaming spaces were one of the last club-like spaces that were still dominated by males. This wasn’t intentional, by the way. Plenty of girls played WoW (I knew several couples who met playing WoW), but a hardcore virtual world like WoW or Everquest was always more appealing to men than to women. In a sane world, we wouldn’t see anything wrong with that.
Of course, it was natural for gaming as medium, being dominated by males, to be the next target of feminist action. Long after their mothers destroyed the lodge and made the golf club admit women, millenial activists targeted games through "journalism." Spaces where people spoke the wrong things should be eliminated, that way nobody will say (or think) the wrong things! The “journalist” reaction to gamergate was targeted at males precisely because those journalists hate males and feel things that males like should be destroyed. They have succeeded in many ways, and now WoW and most other games are heavily censored and deracinated in their conent. We have to be honest: firms like Sweet Baby Inc. hate games because it’s men who play them.
The death of WoW, however, happened by design, though perhaps not for explicit political reasons. The necessity to congregate was severely reduced by systems which automatically queued players into group activities and teleported them there, often with strangers from other servers. Cross-server PVP destroyed the community, as did reducing raids from 40 men to 25 (funnily enough, during the vanilla days, the rurmour was that they were increasing raid size to 100). Now WoW is mostly a solo game where every social activity is done automatically with strangers and is managed by algorithms and gear scores. Current focus on “content” misses that the wholistic system that made the game so fun in 2005, which made the game so important to the people who played it, is totally gone, along with all the “magic” of the old-school MMO.
Discussion about WoW now focuses on “content” of various kinds (which there is never enough of, somehow) and there is a blind spot in the reality that it was what the entire game allowed back then that made it so fun. It was a meeting place like the bowling alley or golf course. Now it’s just an activity, mostly done solo, occasionally with people you’ll likely never run into again. It’s more like a driving range. And when you do meet people, you keep your mouth shut – and I find that odd because WoW went from a wild yet friendly place to an incredibly toxic and annoying crowd of strangers.
In the early 2000s, the internet was an escape from real life; now the internet is just real life that follows you everywhere. There are now far fewer spaces for people (men and women) to just be themselves – both real and virtual.
I am an independent artist and musician. You can get my books by joining my Patreon or Ko-Fi, and you can listen to my current music on YouTube or buy my albums at BandCamp.
70
View draft history
My third place was on message boards. I loved message board culture because you could say or do anything and you felt like you were having real conversations with people. All that got blown up because of social media, which is far less social than the boards every were. You don't even get cool signatures anymore.
Just last year I got curious and decided to go out looking what was around where I lived. No clubs, no hobby groups, no gatherings, not even any classes. There is nothing in meat space anymore, and it feels as if there is somewhere around 1/3 of the people out in public there used to be. No one is interested in social interaction. Really don't know what they're doing instead, but they are definitely not doing it public anymore.
Great insight into the collapse of WoW. I played vanilla, loved it, and tried picking it up again years down the road. It was fun when I got to play with people I knew, but solo became maddeningly boring after a while. I think another Blizzard property, Overwatch, also represents another facet that killed the social gaming scene, which was a shift in focus of a lot of popular games to e-sports and competitive gaming. Overwatch was a great game to just sit back and relax with some friends and play some casual games, but as the game was continually "readjusted" (read: broken) to balance some sort of esoteric competitive meta to satisfy a very small fraction of the player base, they effectively chased off anyone who wasn't a hardcore e-sports enthusiast, which clearly hasn't panned out to the great success they were expecting. That's just one example - there's a lot of online multiplayer games that had pretty robust communities that chased off the crowds by taking that path.