Video Gaming Has Always Been Social

The average video gamer has the image of being  a loner that is stuck indoors for hours on end with no social contact with others.

I don’t think that is a fair stereo type of the gamer. These days there is much fuss made of the social aspect of games. Whether it is playing online with your friends or strangers, or having friends round and playing games like Rock Band or Wii Sports.

But even this isn’t new. Since the dawn of the video game consoles playing video games has been a social activity for gamers.

Back in those far and distance times the social gaming was having your friends round to play on your Atari 2600 or Sinclair Spectrum. At the time at best the games were two player. Otherwise it was friends taking it in turns to play a game in single player mode.

The only real progress over the years was two player modes getting more sophisticated, introducing split screens, dual controller ports. Then as hardware got more powerful we started seeing more ports added so up to four friends could play together at one time on the same game.

While that was all going on some home computer gamers were experimenting with playing games online with their dial up modems and bulletin boards. These early online games were mainly text based adventure games.

These bulletin boards and online games were the early versions of the online communities that we have today.

Some of my fondest gaming memories are those I shared with friends. I had both the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64. I also had the modem Commodore sold for the 64, and a membership of Compunet. It was on Compunet that you were able to download demos with the hacked sound effects and music from games. One of my favourite games and also my best friend Andy was Commando. The Spectrum had the better game play than the 64 version. So while one of us was playing the Spectrum version of the game, with sound turned down. The other would be on the 64 doing the sound effects and music using a demo that would allow you to press keys to get the music or sound effects from the 64 version of the game.

All of the above to todays young gamer would look so primitive but it goes to demonstrate that even in those dark ages gaming never was just a solo anti-social activity. It has always been an activity you could do with your friends.  It’s just that now it’s a cool thing to do.