Bonding with strangers, one dungeon at a time

I'm waiting outside a massive,

barred gate

. I've jumped across a broken

bridge spanning

a river of lava, where a

single misstep

could lead to death. I'm waiting for my companions to join me. Through the gate, I can see a large courtyard, and beyond it, there's a

temple-like structure

that dwarfs everything around. And as I watch, two gigantic scorpions, each the size of a

cargo container

, burst out of the ground.

These scorpions aren't just big. Their stingers pound the ground with incredible force ­ and the ground breaks open and bubbles with lava. They are hungry, angry and they move after their prey with surprising speed. And I ­ along with the others ­ are prey.

The team's job is to get to the structure on the other side of the courtyard. There's no possibility of sneaking past the scorpions. Their pectines are too sensitive, and they know we are there as soon as the gate opens. We have to kill the scorpions.

There are five of us. We get to work. I run towards the scorpion on the left. If I can distract it, the others would gang up and take on the one on the right. I taunt it. Enraged, the scorpion follows me. I run around it, darting in for a hit every now and then. I don't damage it much, but I succeed in making it angrier. It rears back and turns on me. I scuttle around it, just in time to see a huge cone of white hot flame just miss me.

Meanwhile, through the corner of my eye, I can see that one of my companions has fallen. I run over, and try to revive him. It's a mistake. I've taken my eye off my scorpion, and its stinger ­ which looks like one of those hooks that you see on giant cranes ­ crashes into me. My vision blurs and I fall.

It's a videogame that I'm playing, of course.

My companions are people from all over the world. I don't know their names I just know them from the names of their characters.

The names themselves are varied there are the standard, game generated fantasy names ­ Silverkin, Shieldheart, Darksbane and so on. There are the “normal“ names ­ the Miriams and Phils.Then there are the fantasy fan names the Legolases and the Aragorns, the Lews Terin Telamons and Talmanes Delovindes and the Daeneryses and Tyrions.Then there are the crazy ones ­ Gonad the Balbarian, Healary Clinton and Kim Jong Healz ­ (punning on healing is popular with clerics and priests ­ whose main function in encounters and dungeons is to heal wounded party members), Tank Sinatra and Sofa King Good ­ you get the idea.

But it's not about the names. In a way, multiplayer videogames were the first social networks ­ where groups of friends could get together online for a shared experience ­ starting with Maze War back in 1974 ­ 10 years before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

And it's become even more so with the rise of Massively Multiplayer Online games like World of Warcraft or Guild Wars 2 or Eve Online or Neverwinter. Think about it. You are in a group of five, ten or even forty people. Some you know, many you don't. You have an objective ­ to enter a dungeon and defeat the monster that waits for you at the other end. And this creature ­ let's call it Yogg Saron, is a tentacle monstrosity that can drive your character insane if you're not careful. And if you don't kill him within 15 minutes, he kills the whole party. This means, that you have to know your role in the raid ­ and hope that your companions do too. One misstep, and the whole party dies. It's like a huge teambuilding test ­ only it's much more fun to battle Yogg Saron or Orcus or the Dread Council than sit in a room with a bunch of bored cynical colleagues who are there simply because they need to finish the requisite numbers of “training hours“ spent as part of their appraisal objectives for the year.

The shared gaming experience also offers a perfect demonstration of the Dunning Kruger effect.You may think you're good at games when you max out your achievements with single player campaigns. Then you go online ­ and you get slaughtered, or that there are players who are orders of magnitude better than you are.The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias “wherein persons of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.“ In short, you're so bad that you don't even know you're bad. It's only when you play with others do you realize how much you have to learn.

And this is where online communities come in. Much gets written about the misogynist player who curses `n00bs' or screams about “your mom“, but what never gets mentioned is the vast number of players who are genuinely kind and willing to help new players with tactics, gear or strategy .And in that way, the social network gets stronger. Goals are clear, and you want to show your guildmates that you can be trusted in a raid or skirmish, and you improve.

Last week, the economists Erik Hurst, Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils and Kerwin Charles of the US National Bureau of Economic Research argue that more and more young men are dropping out of the labour force to play video games.And it's not surprising. Despite what `thought leaders', inspirational speakers, and “Do-whatyou-love“ peddlers say, work, for most people, remains drudgery, punctuated by rare moments of satisfaction. But videogames?
They're getting better, with better graphics, better sound, better gameplay ­ everything.

Yesterday was Video Game Day. And so, this weekend, I'm heading once more into the breach with my guildmates, to slay the scorpions and face the dragon that lies beyond.