Most people hunger for human connections with each other. I believe that’s what is at the center of the “social” phenomena: social networking, social gaming, social everything. When future historians look back at the early 3rd millenia, I think we’ll be noted more for the massive social changes that happened as a consequence of our new technologies (the Internet), but not so much for the technology itself.
Before the industrial revolution, people lived in authentic communities. They knew each other, depended on each other, played with each other. They raised barns together! With the industrial revolution, the nature of work changed–most people became organized around synthetic communities based on their specialized skills (we call them corporations). Since some of these specialized skills were scarce, they paid more, which caused a further refactoring of residences along economic boundaries. That’s why your next-door neighbor is likely to make a similar amount of money as you, drive a similar car, and live in a similar house–but might have very different values and interests. Their life’s challenges are likely to be entirely independent of yours.
If you live in an apartment building, and if you’re like most people–you don’t really know your neighbors. The fact is, you don’t have much in common with them. Consumer goods companies and the mass media emerged to fill the void left by our lack of human contact–but the hunger for human contact never went away… although it was largely forgotten for a while.
Enter social networks: they give you the ability to maintain connections with people based on interests. Games have given people a new way to confront challenges, organize and achieve things within this new community.
The greatest innovation of the last decade (in my opinion) is the re-realization that human connections play in every aspect of our lives. However, we’re still at the beginning of learning all the implications; and technology has a long way to go to catch up with a billion years of biology. For example, we know from psychological experiments that people act much different when they can’t see another person: they can become indifferent to pain. And anyone who has played an MMORPG can tell you that people act much differently (read: much more rudely) than they do in real life.
However, Facebook is built upon a schema of real identities. Sure, it isn’t perfect and it isn’t enough to overcome the organic nature of face-to-face communities, but I do think it has created somewhat of a shift in how people behave toward each other online. People are much more concerned about how they’re remembered. Honor, reputation and trust become important in ways they aren’t within anonymous communities and anonymized games.
Whole new types of social applications are already taking advantage of this phenomena. However, games haven’t really done so (yet). A challenge: can games take advantage of this in a new way? What does it mean to take away the anonymous “safety net” from an immersive gaming experience?
