This concept of "parallel play" as a form of play where young children play adjacent to each other but independently is always on my mind when playing online games.

I know this is accurate because any time I've played this game, at least half the deaths were from throwing each other into pits

To be fair, throwing each other into pits is hilarious

The nice thing about battlefield is it kinda just works. If i play a squad with friends on comms its lots of fun but if i play with strangers its also fun. Comms isn't really needed the games organically built with cooperation in mind and it kinda just happens. The only issue i have is sniper classes being the fallback when the team is losing rather than equipping smoke grenades and going for an aggressive push.

Agreed! I greatly enjoyed the old battlefield games. I have very fond memories of playing the commander role in bf2 or 2142, assigning players objectives where they'd earn additional xp for helping the team, passing information about the game state to squad leaders, or just air-dropping supply crates on annoying snipers who were being a nuisance. The role tied the team together as a team. Same with multi-crew vehicles that required at least two people to operate, and many support systems.

I flat refused to play 2042 when i saw there was no command role, tiny squad sizes and very limited means of communicating and coordinating with the team.

And then battlebit swaggered in to the room with robust team comms, tons of important support roles, massive xp rewards for transport vehicle operators, and a bunch of other cool pro-social features.

And you get all kinds of emergent micro-roles beyond just the class selection. I always hated driving tanks and never did it, but I was super good at fending of helicopters with the mounted machine gun

I don't know. I do think that the loss of persistent, privately run servers contributed. There was a time when to play an online game you'd go to a server browser and join a private server run and moderated by real humans. No match making or p2p servers or anything. Most people had a few favorite servers they played on regularly and you'd get to know the other regulars. Most of those servers had separate web forums where you could talk to people. So there was a venue for a stable community to form. If you epic gamer momented to hard or were otherwise being a shit you could be ejected and banned. There was a social environment. With p2p and matchmaking there's nothing. You're thrown in to different groups every 10-20 minutes and unless you friend those people and acitvely seek them out you'll never see them again. Your group is often limited to 2-4, at most six, people at a time.

Even if you avoid complete alienation you can only play with a handful of people at a time. Ranks and matchmaking mean there are consequences for screwing around too much - you have to at least try to play well to keep everyone's rank up. If your friend's rank is too high above or below yours you may not be able to play together at all.

Things weren't great in the past but the mechanisms that existed for community building back then were in some ways more robust than they are now. There's discord now that serves a similar role but with key differences - discords often aren't attached to a persistent server so you're less likely to be playing with all the people on your discord. You might be on a discord with people while your team mates and opponents are still abstractn depersonalized avatars.

Many people struggle to conceive of the random people they interact with online as really people people, and just interact with them as if they're part of the website/game. NPCs, in other words

can confirm, i feel bad about the things i said to some poor canadian furry lib who wandered on here when federation happened, the rest of the libs, not at all

Yes, but capitalists benefit more from people embracing individualism and many people have been indoctrinated into that belief for multiple generations now. Because the US and many other places frame nearly everything as competitive instead of cooperative, we have started to default to that even in settings that are obviously meant to be cooperative.

It is really sad. Then again, our faction were purple spandex clad posadist commies armed with gay disco lasers, while the other factions were literally fascist proto alt-right assholes (the in-game faction and the largest groups in that faction) and the thrid group had some sort of union-busting libertarian capitalist theme.

I think we had a home field advantage.

I studied CS, but I also studied a lot in the social sciences and was so disheartened by how completely incurious most of my CS peers were about anything outside of STEM. It’s bonkers to me that we weren’t required to take so much as an ethics course considering how much of our world is shaped by code.

I feel like I just had this conversation with one of the few homies I have who unvarnished knows my politics and knows how much I outright despise what I call 'techbros' despite swimming in the same professional pools as them; like-- my reason for it is and always has been to go into games. I know finance, weapons, and surveillance would all pay hand over fist more; but for me, my principles and the intersections of my identity mean more to me than easily-spent, easily-devalued blood money.

And that's why I can't stand techbros. Because they don't even seem to consider the ethics of whose orders they're carrying out; and as a result, I have no faith in what fruit their works will bear.

I have consistently good experience with pugs/pubbies and i sincerely wonder if it isn't because i have a deep man voice that is culturally associated with competence and authority regardless of how full of shit i am at any moment.

I think there's a long standing trend of the hard sciences dismissing the soft sciences out of hand because we can't stick all of humanity in a petri dish in order to perform experiments according to the scientific method and arrive at rigorous results. The hard sciences often dismiss us because our tools are limited in what kind of knowledge we can produce. But it seems they often dismiss the entire notion of social sciences and express that if the problem is too complex to apply the scientific method then it shouldn't be investigated at all, even going so far as to assert that the squishy stuff isn't real. It's unfortunate. I perceive stem as being somewhere between severely limited and totally helpless as a result of their rejection of the social sciences and liberal arts. I sometimes express it by saying stem knows how to do things but they don't know why to do things and they scoff at all the forms of knowledge that could tell them why to do things. I've observed that many engineers who care about the whys, about the human cost, struggle with the industry because so much of tech these days is espionage, manipulation, or just outright building guns.

I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video

parallel play is my absolute jam tbh my partner and I do it all the time. it really does feel like we're doing something together without suffering through trying to find a co-op game.

i have a room I could go to to play games but I prefer to be near him even if i dont really follow whatever he's doing

edit: my post is not related to the original post but I refuse to delete it

Yeah, I've heard that. Idk what the science says but it's a good explanation for that close but independent kind of socialization. I did think that when I was writing this it sounds like a bad straw-autistic person from popular media. And I know that's not true, and that you can't generalize about autistic people. Most of the people in my gaming group are autistic. It's a very social group and we work very well together when we get in to the groove. And there is, as you mentioned, many times of companionable silence when folks just know they're in the same discord together, but not saying anything. To me it completely bears out the observation that autistic people do just fine in social settings when they don't have to deal with allistic social expectations.

It's so gross. I feel all twisted up inside when I encounter people who do understand the skinner box rat in a maze manipulation being done to them and they don't care or worse support it. I recognize when it's doing it's work on me and occaisionally it tears through my mask of "it is what it is" and i actually feel what it's like to be treated as an animal trained to push a lever by a bunch of evil psychologists. It's just such a fucked up, cruel, affront to any notion of human dignity.

The funny thing about the "power fantasy" crowd; the marketing for the game is intentionally fascist propaganda. If you watch closely the "heroic" helldivers are murdering alien bugs who are minding their own business. The helldivers are stabbing a helpless bug to death with their flag them do a bro-y chest bump while strike fighters fly overhead. In the gameplay video trailers you can see the players blowing each other up by accident a number of times. That's what let me know the game was going to be a worth successor, on of the trailer players beaning their allies in the head.

But it's all silly. It's propaganda. All the in-game portrayals of the helldivers as unstoppable heroes is a joke. They're glass cannons with five minutes of training who get thawed out of a cryo tube, fired out of a giant gun at a planet, and die screaming five minutes later when they're being torn apart by giant bugs and their buddy oopsies a cluster bomb air strike right on top of it.

It's a very deliberately, joyfully silly game. You are immensely powerful, you've got massive starship guns at your finger tips, but you aim them by throwing a laser baseball around and there are absolutely no safety features so if the baseball bounces off a tree and lands at your feet them you're boned.

The game is an open, obvious mockery of Spess Mehrines and the fascistic xenophobic war propaganda military sci-fi genre and so many people just don't get it.

L4D1 closeting?

From my memories of gaming back in the day there's long been an issue of gamers not wanting to play support classes. I remember healers and clerics being considered feminine roles, and that a lot of people, mostly young men, wanted to be some kind of dps character that was viewed as more masculine. I also recall a general perception that healers were subordinate to damage classes and that the healers were somehow not really playing the game. Like they were "just" supporting the other characters, not really playing and doing the fun jobs.

Those perceptions were mostly bullshit. In many games strong support players determined wether a team won or loss and mmorpg groups simply could not function without a healer, and you could survive a crappy dps but you couldn't survive with a bad healer

The issue persisted in some shooter games. Most people wanted to shoot people instead of healing. There were mechanical problems, too - often the game mechanics of supports were very limited. A healer or a mechanic would just look at a paladin or a vehicle and hold down the "heal" button. Then the other players would run off to do much more mechanically complex gameplay.

There's definitely a great difference in attitudes. Combat players can focus on glory, and it doesn't necessarily matter if the team wins or loses. Supports, on the other hand, are acting as force multipliers. They can give the team enormous boosts but at some point the rest of the team has to do their job. A dps or front line player doesn't necessarily need to care about the team while a support's entire game is tied to the team.

I had weird stats when I played planetside bc I spent most of my game time sitting in the back of an apc with the map opened talking to my squads on team speak. I had a lot of play time but a lower level and rank compared to equivalent players. I played an engineer mostly so i could protect spawn points, which meant i spent less time shooting and was often focusing on healing a spawn point even if it meant my character would get killed. Anything to keep the spawn point up so my team could keep sending in reinforcements for even one second.

I'd say the other extreme from your team focused supports would be "snipers". Of all the play styles i view it as the most aggressively anti-socialm sniper style players, at least in the olden days before a lot of anti-sniper mechanics were developed, would sit far out on the edges of the map. Normal players often could not meaningfully damage them while they could kill others in a single hit. Sniper style players, i don't view them as players, i view them as some kind of social parasite. They don't participate in the game, instead they disrupt the game for everyone else. They sit at a range where they can kill others, interupting the game, but they themselves can't be killed. They mostly don't contribute to objectives or team fights. "Sniper" in this sense also encompasses players who focus on aircraft, or in some games on ground vehicles. To this kind of player all the other players in the game are targets or hinderances. Their gameplay consists largely of interupting the play of others who have no meanignful way to defend themselves. They generally aren't in communication with their team and aren't cooperating. I used to take great join in deep flanking to hunt snipers. I can't shoot for beans but back in the old days snipers were often very fixated on their shooting and wouldn't notice someone walking up from behind to blast them. To me that highlights the disconnect - they're so focused on their disruptive style of play that many of them didn't seem to consider that anyone but other snipers could effect their game. They weren't really playing with others, they were standing outside the basketball court throwing rocks at people.

And you do get combat focused leaders. People who use their skills at communication, problem solving, and leadership to support their team from outside of the games mechanical systems. Even very simple leadership like telling the team to go to the A capture point or the B capture point could greatly contribute to a team's success. In games like Planetside or EVE leader roles could happen without the players even being in the game program. They might just be in the communications program, reading maps, crunching numbers, directing their subordinates, and passing information to other commanders.

And those players varied, too, in how social they were. My group had a system of "fun check" where if the team was bogged down in a fight that was going nowhere team leaders were expected to call "fun check" on the mic and if a certain ratio of players expressed that they weren't enjoying themselves we'd retreat and regroup, or move to another area, or do something goofy like getting a bunch of spaceships and crashing them all in to the enemy base. The goal was to remember that this was supposed to be a fun, social experience and prevent people from reaching a point where they became frustrated or upset.

And then on the other side you had leaders like the old "50 dkp minus!" Meme guy who could be very harsh and seemed less interested in their team mates as players of a game intended to be fun.

There's definitely a negative, harmful kind of social player. Let's call them try-hards or sweats. Plkayers who are very aware of the team but consider the team an impediment to their own glory. These players do interact socially but tend to do so in a negative manner where they berate others for perceived mistakes or bark orders at others without concern for whether anyone is having fun. This kind of player seems to view the social component entirely as a tool for them to achieve their desired glory and is generally indifferent to the actions of others unless he perceives them as failing him or getting in his way. Emphasis on "he", folks with that social style seem to be highly gendered.

Gender does play a huge role in this, come tot hink of it. At least in the past their was pressure for women to take "passive" feminized support roles and to avoid leadership positions. Plenty of people defied this of course. We made it a point to put every new player in command of a squad on their first day to aggressively break the idea that you had to be "good" or popular to lead. We'd give these new squad leaders support and answer their questions, but they were encouraged to make decisions. It was important to get women to take leadership roles in this ad-hoc way to break down gendered stereotypes and maintain that culture where women were allowed, expected, and supported as leaders. It certaintly wasn't perfect. We tried, and some were more committed to it than others.

I've observed many women are uncertain about their skills and competence and often apologize, i assume to try to diffuse potential critical comments or frustration from men co-players. It's honestly heartbreaking. A few months back I had a woman who felt she had to apologize repeatedly to the team. She was playing the game at the very highest level of difficulty, in a supporot role, and was absolutely pulling her weight and contributing to the team's victory. Not only had she nothing to apologize for, but she was performing in probably the top 95% of all players despite having limited time in the game. She was excelling beyond others but still felt she needed to protect herself by pre-emptively apologizing to man peers.

I find it so frustrating that women have to take these actions to protect themselves from gendered social violence, despite having every right to be there and expect fair and compassionate treatement. My group has always worked from a bedrock of understanding that active, enthusiastic cooperation is far more important than individual skill, but most groups aren't like that and we aren't perfect about it. Gender, disability, income and poverty, race, all are very frought in gaming. I've met a number of women who won't use voice comms under any circumstances because their voice would out them as trans and they'd face immediate abuse. Revealing yourself to be a woman in any manner can lead to immediate genedered social violence. People with disabilities may perform at different levels compared to abled people. That's doubly a problem where game stats are concerned. A person's k:d doesn't reflect their contribution either to a groups victory in game or the groups social cohesion and social benefit to it's members. The numbers on the screen only show what someone's shooting skills are relative to others, and an ableist society can be quick to level social violence against a disabled player.

I'm rambling at this point.

Regarding tech bros - tech culture does seem to hegemonically enforce a belief that humans are individuals that exist in themselves rather than humans as nodes within a complex social network. In their culture the person exists alone and relying on formal or informal systems of support shows both weakness as well as foolishness for believing such things are real. Tech culture as a whole seems to disdain a broad education, especially in the humanities, which in turn leads tech bros in their ignorance to think that ideas important to them are either something they came up on by themselves or they ascribe themselves to tech figures they idolize. The culture seems very competitive and cutthroart; loyalty and compassion anre disincentivized by the ruthless business practices of tech corps. There seems to be a widespread belief that formal education and knowledge in the arts and humanities is useless and irrelevant at best, or entirely false woo woo nonsense at worst. The notion of culture, of an all-encompassing and inescapable mesh of practices, norms, and beliefs that define the parameters of who we are as people and as societies, seems very much anethema to their conception of themselves as self made men and their slavish adherence to great man theory. Again, generalization, a very broad br

What about the far less common phenomena of the player who will only play support/heals? This player will sacrifice themselves to protect the team even in situations where it probably wasn't necessary. I'm not an anything-ologist so I'm always so fascinated when someone talks about stuff like this.

I enjoy playing this role but usually because it's actually the lynchpin of the team and has the highest level of skill and responsibility (in the actually challenging content not the storyquest content). DPS on the other hand is usually for people that chew rocks and doesn't ever have to think about anything other than attacking a thing and dodging circles.

Support in a raid is the hardest role to play with the most important decisions.

Agree that DRG is a better built game. It forces people into roles and while you can double up on a role, it's usually not going to work. On a 4 player game, you need all four classes tools to succeed. Helldivers 2 is really fun, but it fails at providing mechanics that aren't shooting. The jetpack should be a viable tool for movement, but the cool down is so high it's worthless. And all the objectives are mechanically the same. Go to a place, press a button combo and wait.

I think OP makes good points, but there are mechanical reasons that you often get 4 people with the same load out and that's because all their is to do in the game is killing things.