Playing online games has become a social experience. It’s a recent and successful genre by which players can interact and connect with each other easily via different massively multiplayer online games. These new games are purposefully created to encourage social interactions among players. Members of these communities typically share an interest in online gaming and a great deal of the interaction between them is technologically mediated. However this phenomenon is dramatically spreading around societies that it’s becoming a threat in a way that people are becoming addicts to a virtual world, and forgetting about reality.
Sociology and Psychology tend to place a great emphasize on studying this virtual social interaction by applying different theories. For example, psychologists argue that one of the main reasons behind the success of this genre is that players are more likely to avoid stress-causing relationships when they develop an online society, resulting in more stable and social networks, and that’s is described by the Structural Balance Theory. In addition to that, sociologists best describe this behavior by the Interaction Theory, which basically talks about the following:
Online multiplayer games enable the formation of lasting relationships. They encourage interaction and collaboration between players, which may be through a certain condition for making progress in a game, or a game may be based on competition between players. For example, some online games enable its player to get married and have a virtual wife or husband with children!
Sociologists also argue that the technological communication tools that a typical multiplayer game offer to its players such as text, image, and sound, support this virtual interaction and enable communication between whole groups and communities. In addition to using the modes of communication offered by games, members of multiplayer communities may keep in touch face to face, over the phone, or even via email.
Moreover, long-term online interactions serve the whole world by gathering different communities, each with distinctive culture and identity in a small, social village. For example, appearance or age, are often insignificant in multiplayer gaming communities. A 15-year-old Arabic schoolgirl, a 30-year-old French housewife, and a 45-year-old American businessman can all be members of the same community.
