Gaming's Online Multiplayer Problems

Playing an online competitive game as a latecomer just downright sucks. It is the gaming equivalent of opening a door to be punched in the face by a boxing glove that was rigged as a trap. Trying to get into any online game after its main hype has passed is a difficult and grindy experience. Many new players will get soul-crushingly destroyed by the hordes of skilled and practiced players who understand the ins and outs of every map and have even begun to peel away at the layers of metagaming.

One of the most prominent example of a game with a severe gap of skill between newcomers and experienced players is Overwatch. It truly is a shame to see that there is a game out there made with so much accessibility in mind to be one of the most harrowing online multiplayer experiences one can face as a newbie. Despite the amazing premise of the game and the wonderful character and charm, it is impossible for me to get into Overwatch because I simply can’t stand how I get destroyed in every match with no hope of a win as a new player.

The biggest problem with gaming’s accessibility is gamers’ general disdain for newbies. Many can relate to the experience of being referred to dismissively as a ‘casual’ or ‘noob’ and treated like a second-class citizen as a result. The ‘git gud’ culture is pervasive throughout all genres of videogames and is a sign of a more toxic attitude behind the scenes of gaming. This is not a sustainable situation and this is precisely the kind of behaviour that turns off non-gamers from the medium. We have created a strange kind of culture where new players are specifically made to feel unwelcome.

While everybody loves to be good at games, and most gamers offer little more than snorts of derision to the lesser-skilled, I believe that this is one of the biggest problems with online gaming and gamer culture to date; a gaming culture that alienates rather than includes. This has caused major problems with how gaming is viewed by outsiders looking in.

On the other hand, there are big problems with marketing a game with accessibility in mind. There is an image of games that cater for ‘casual’ gamers as being of ‘lesser’ quality. In fact, many commenters on more toxic gaming sites will happily deride the more easily accessible games as ‘for casuals’ and will treat such games with disdain and even anger.

A happy balance needs to be struck between maintaining a game’s hardcore appeal but also in allowing more accessibility. Currently, the balance seems to have shifted towards the ‘hardcore’ gamers, with Overwatch and Dark Souls dominating the gaming world, and a typical walled-off mentality to any would-be newcomer to gaming. But if gaming is to continue to grow we need to examine how we are treating our player bases. If we continue to alienate, gaming culture runs the risk of continuing to be alienated by other media cultures as a childish pursuit.

More effort needs to be made to make online competitive gaming a more friendly place for all. We are nowhere near a level where we can call online gaming an all-around ‘good’ experience. Between toxic tryhards and angry trolls, it is difficult to find any online game that hasn’t been tarnished terribly by the toxicity of gamer culture. Perhaps the difficulty of integrating into an online competitive game is the most practical example of how gaming’s community problems are stacking up.

We need more games that will try to level the gap between new and lesser skilled players and the more experienced, hardcore gamers that practice all day long. Perhaps this can be done by better separating the two; so far I have seen an extreme deluge of games where hardcore gamers are placed into the same playlists as new players and often exploit such matchmaking systems to create easy matchups for themselves. It’s clear that matchmaking algorithms as they are today are not sufficient for keeping the skill gap at an even and fair level.

On the other hand, perhaps we also need more games like Mario Kart, where newbies are allowed to feel like they have a chance to win, with powerups and other gameplay difficulties dynamically adjusted to allow the lesser skilled to even the playing field. Hardcore gamers will cry foul at this idea, but perhaps this could be done in conjunction with a ‘hardcore’ multiplayer mode that turns off such adjustment, to appease those that want to play purely through skill, as fair or unfair as that can be.

In any game, there are winners and losers, but the real challenge is making losing fun, or making the losers feel like they had a real chance. Gaming has been far too unforgiving to the losers. In order to help gaming culture continue to mature, and for the medium to continue to grow, we need a shift in thought and a shift in design ideas to allow those of all skill levels to play online games on a relatively even and enjoyable field, such that new and less experienced players can enjoy a gentler introduction to games they’re trying for the first time, and that hardcore gamers can still get that purely-skill based level of eSport that they deserve.

Online Games: Let's All Calm Down a Little, Please?

This post may be a bit more controversial than ones that I have done in the past. Online competitive gaming is all the rage right now, thanks to League of Legends, DOTA, Overwatch and many more massively-popular titles that are all riding the wave of online multiplayer to the tune of billions of pounds of profit. To say that online gaming is big business isn’t controversial, but to say that I find it unenjoyable probably will be.

The main reason that I don’t usually play online multiplayer games often is simply because of the toxicity of most player bases. It may be tarring with the same brush but I have found that with my time in gaming it is impossible to find any online competitive game that isn’t tarnished by a violently-nasty set of players who will harass and name-call you with ever-increasing levels of profanity. One of the worst examples is in Grand Theft Auto Online, where after I shot and killed a player a couple of times in deathmatch I received a message that I simply can’t repeat here, telling me to kill myself. Grand Theft Auto is an extreme case, but the fact that this case exists at all, and the fact that so many gamers corroborate such stories daily, shows that the culture around gaming just isn’t good enough.

The gaming community as a whole has become so completely toxic, corrupted by a sad trend of a nasty minority ruining things for the many. It’s such a shame because I feel that online gaming offers a whole world of opportunities, but it’s telling that in a world where DayZ exists, a massively-multiplayer zombie survival game, where players can interact as much as they want with each other, band together, or go on raids, or even create communities like The Walking Dead, instead so much of DayZ is spent avoiding other people for fear that instead of actually interacting with you in any meaningful way, players would sooner just shoot you in the head and harass you. It seems that instead of engaging with each other as a community, thanks to how online gaming has evolved we are instead treating one another as enemies.

I think that what makes online gaming so toxic is because of how intensely competitive games have become. Players are gaming intensely hard in competitive events and becoming incredibly emotionally charged. In a deathmatch type FPS game, this is also done hand-in-hand with visceral, high-octane violence. It is totally understandable that players can become very emotionally tense in such an environment and occasionally blow up at one another; just look at how angry sports fans can get, for example.

However, I think that it is so sad that I mention games and sports hooliganism in such a parallel context, and I think that this spells out a problem in the gaming community that needs to be dealt with somehow. There needs to be a cultural shift towards engaging with each other in more civil ways. I wish not to engage with controversial politically-sensitive topics, but it’s telling that any conversation around accessibility in gaming is treated with a razor’s edge. We have become hyper-sensitive, toxic and too aggressive, and overall I think we need to just calm down.

Games like Overwatch are so good because they try extremely hard to shift gaming’s entire culture by discouraging toxicity. For example, players attempting to type trash talk at one another in Overwatch instead find their messages replaced with text designed to humiliate themselves for the audacity to do so. On top of that, so much of Overwatch is made carefully to boost accessibility and encourage different playstyles and to engage with each other in a less angry way; the focus is on teamwork and objectives instead of killing, just like Splatoon.

I think that overall, Overwatch is a good example of how online competitive gaming should move forward, with a focus on engagement rather than confrontation. We need more games that shift the focus to the objective instead. Gaming culture has become corrupt somehow. Thanks to anonymity, trolling and trash talk, I find it difficult to find a rewarding experience from playing online. I hope that in the future, we have calmed down a little, and can talk to one another like mature people who all understand that we share that one thing; a love of gaming.

I don’t claim to know how to turn this around, but I think Overwatch has made some important steps forward in improving accessibility. Rocket League is another excellent example, as is Speedrunners, and many indie games are showing ways in which we can use online gaming to come together instead of make each other’s gaming lives miserable. Gaming is overall becoming a better place, thanks to the aforementioned trend of games that are less about confrontation, not to mention all the Let's Players and Twitch streamers, who are developing communities that are growing together in much healthier ways. Charity streams, in particular, show just how much potential for understanding there is in the gaming space. 

I would, however, recommend right now for anyone looking to have a good time gaming online to only do it with friends that you know and trust outside of the game for now, until we can learn to take a step back and understand that we all love games, and we all want to have a great time together.