Massively online, eerily quiet.

It’s been a long time since I was a regular gamer. I’ll fess up why - I’m an addict. I can’t control myself around an Xbox. As spotty as my productivity has been over the years, it would have been nonexistent if I’d kept gaming.

So I missed this change that Luke Winkie writes about at Slate (although I was never much of a multiplayer fan so maybe it would have slipped past me anyway).

This is part of a shift that can be felt across video game culture writ large. Even though some of the biggest franchises in the world—Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends—pit a server’s worth of players against one another in lethal combat, the softer interactions those places once fomented are on the decline. We are all in front of our computers, paradoxically together and separate, like ships passing in the night.

This is a difficult trend to prove empirically, but it certainly has been felt by lifelong gamers. There are multiple somber YouTube video essays about the lack of conviviality in multiplayer lobbies, and most of them bear titles that gesture toward an elemental wound in the culture. (One video, titled “Modern Gaming Is Becoming More and More Isolated,” has over 500,000 views.)

Winkie reflects on his early days playing World of Warcraft (WoW), starting back in 2005 when he received the game as a birthday gift. Back then, WoW wasn’t just about slaying dragons and collecting loot—it was a social hub where players connected, chatted, and formed friendships that often felt as real as anything offline. He recalls the game’s magic being in how it brought people together, forging bonds through shared adventures and late-night convos.

All good.

Except that maybe it’s not anymore. Chat boxes that used to buzz with banter are now silent. Voice chat, once a staple for team play, is largely absent. Players might team up, but once the mission ends, they drift apart without a word.

Winkie says the decline in sociability isn’t just a WoW thing—it’s a thing across multiplayer gaming. Fortnite, Call of Duty, lots of big titles, they’re still getting millions of players but the players aren’t talking to each other as much.

I’d guess there are still lots of people who play with friends, and that they’re still chatting up a storm. But I’m curious if anyone here is hooking up with randos for raids and good times anymore.

If the camaraderie that once defined online play is fading, maybe it’s part of the sense of loneliness and isolation which is definitely a thing these days.

That said, Winkie doesn’t romanticize multiplayer entirely. He cops to the nasty shit which was always a part of the culture. Racism, sexism etc. And some of that is surely a reason for driving some people away. It’s the reason millions of people fled Elon’s Twitter hellscape after all.