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.
Agreed that the digital 3rd spaces are dead. I believe a different explanation for their decline though. I think that the digital 3rd spaces thrived when it was primarily Millenials on them and the camaraderie and social aspect declined as they phased out of it. X'ers had malls and as soon as X'ers were done with them they faded, Y'ers had mmos and as soon as Y'ers were done with them they faded. No matter how terribly suited WoW is for being a 3rd space now Y'ers made it work when games were as crummy as Ragnarok Online or Runescape.
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.
Agreed that the digital 3rd spaces are dead. I believe a different explanation for their decline though. I think that the digital 3rd spaces thrived when it was primarily Millenials on them and the camaraderie and social aspect declined as they phased out of it. X'ers had malls and as soon as X'ers were done with them they faded, Y'ers had mmos and as soon as Y'ers were done with them they faded. No matter how terribly suited WoW is for being a 3rd space now Y'ers made it work when games were as crummy as Ragnarok Online or Runescape.