And those new friends you made at the arcade were more often than not invited over to your home for more gaming. You crowded around the TV, each armed with a controller, and spent hours playing one game after another. And the greatest thing about the arcade and offline multiplayer games is that the people are right there in the room with you. You can get up and go to the kitchen for snacks, decide to put on a movie, or just turn everything off and have a conversation.

Meanwhile, social interaction is limited in online gaming communities. Sure, you may meet a guy from Germany while playing Splinter Cell but can you invite that guy from Germany over to your house or to catch a movie at the multiplex? No. The relationships you build in online gaming communities are limited only to the game. Unless you are playing Splinter Cell, you will never hear from your German friend. You won’t run into him at the grocery store and you probably won’t compare war stories about your favorite Final Fantasy game. Chances are you will never even know his real name or any facet of his personality. When you play online you are not making friendships; you’re making acquaintances.

While I don’t begrudge anybody for taking advantage of new technology, I simply don’t understand why so many gamers are deciding to all but forsake offline game play when it is much more genuine and personable than playing online. However, it’s important to keep in mind that offline gaming is not dead. Just recently, Criterion (developers of the Burnout series) released the first-person shooter Black. Here was a game that screamed “online multiplayer”: big explosions, rag-doll physics, level designs that are tailor-made for firefights. Imagine my surprise when I found out it was a strictly single-player game. And of course the pinnacle of the single player game can be found in the X-Box classic Morrowind, especially the game of the year edition. It is truly never the same game twice and you can play through at your own pace.

So will online gaming ever slay the offline gaming community and culture? Will there come a day when console gamers (always seen a rough and unsophisticated by PC gamers) have forgotten what it’s like to play games with their friends that have real names and not screen names? I certainly hope not and I seriously doubt it. However, I’m sure that there will come a day when the majority of the games on the market are designed strictly for online multiplayer games, when developers all but stop making arcade games, and when the only gaming parties you have are over games that no longer attract players online.

And that would be gamers forgetting their roots, and that is never a good thing.

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