For Men Who Hate Talking on the Phone, Games Keep Friendships Alive

https://kotaku.com/for-men-who-hate-talking-on-the-phone-games-keep-frien-1835277944

by wallflower • 7 years ago

259 99 7 years ago

gtirloni• 7 years ago

Interesting, I've never thought about this but it matches my recent experience.

Friendship as an adult has been about shared interests, not being assigned to the same class or living nearby, so it makes sense.

elvecinodeabajo• 7 years ago

Totally. I didn't think about that ever but it's true.

Aversion to the phone calls doesn't appear when talking to other in VoIP chats when playing online games.

Cool thought.

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

Why is that though?

Does someone like Trello have a discord-to-POTS bridge?

HNLurker2• 7 years ago

Friendship as an adult has been about shared interests, not being assigned to the same class or living nearby,

Hits too close to home there.

criddell• 7 years ago

Kids change it too. It's hard not to make friends when you see the same parents a couple times a week at soccer or baseball or swimming, year-after-year. There's a lot of downtime and you around people that you have something in common with.

Steve44• 7 years ago

With both of our kids we had a great social life with groups of the other parents all through school. There were annual dances, fetes, mums nights out, dads nights out, meeting for a quick beer etc. etc. Now the kids have left school the majority of that has dropped off, we do keep in good social contact with a couple of people but I really miss how busy and varied the social life used to be.

klausjensen• 7 years ago

I second this... One of my best friends moved to another country, and we regularly talk on VOIP during console games.

Hell, sometimes we talk for an hour and never even manage to start the game...

monk_e_boy2• 7 years ago

I’ve seen this with my kids and their school friends when they play online together. They chat and encourage each other, its really sweet and completely different to their off line rough and tumble play. I wake up on the weekends to quiet whispers of “sick play, dude.”

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

What ages are your kids / what games do they play (as a father of three i want to encourage the good stuff / discourage the bad)

monk_e_boy2• 7 years ago

10 and 7, although the 7 year old plays with the 10 year olds online.

They play minecraft, fortnite, brawlhalla, titanfall 2 ... mostly. They play in the lounge with us watching (I'll youtube while they play) and any game that is a 15, group chat is off.

We are on PS4 so you can turn game chat off and turn friend chat on in the PS4 friend settings.

ken• 7 years ago

How’s the sound quality of these gaming systems?

I hate talking on phones more than ever because rectangular “candybar” smartphones aren’t a good fit for a face, and the audio quality is terrible. I have to keep saying “What did you say?”

Of course I prefer meeting in person, and ideally in a place that isn’t pumping in music. It’s the only way to hold an actual conversation.

keypusher• 7 years ago

Sound quality and audio codec compression of these services (Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak, Ventrilo) is generally quite good, they are designed to support rapid coordination of large groups in high intensity situations and e-sports tournaments. It was not uncommon to have 40+ people in a single voice channel for MMO raids 10 years ago, and things have only improved since then. However, your experience will be significantly affected by your choice of headset and microphone. I have spent a lot of time in voice channels and it's common to have long conversations among groups of friends or online acquaintances there.

vwyxp• 7 years ago

Sound quality is perfectly fine. When it's not, it's always because the other party has a crappy microphone or a crappy connection.

kazagistar3• 7 years ago

I just had a chat on mumble last night catching up with a collage friend who now lives back home in the middle east. It was totally fine and clear. I also had a chat with my mother over a cell phone, and she lives in another city in the same state, and that quality was way worse and actually dropped audio at one point. It's really kinda embarrassing how bad phones are at this point, relatively speaking.

bartwe• 7 years ago

With proper headphones, mic and a higher bitrate it is superior to phonecalls

outime• 7 years ago

I made true friends through Ventrilo/TeamSpeak and different games (but mostly Counter-Strike). I’ve never made a phone call to a friend unless truly necessary but I’ve spent several hours talking through these.

Nowadays with Discord it’s just so much easier and fun for everyone. I’m happy that it was invented and just wish it was open-source but oh well.

qznc• 7 years ago

What is wrong with Mumble? https://www.mumble.com/

hi5eyes• 7 years ago

discords communities make it more powerful than almost any site/service save maybe for irc at its peak

if you’re early 20s or younger everyones on discord, even if you dont game. its a general group messaging platform

JimiofEden• 7 years ago

Lack of users in my experience. The people on mumble tend to be the 'old guard' or people who have been playing MMOs or online games since 90s/early 00s. But all of my friends or new people I've met are all on Discord only

kazagistar3• 7 years ago

Discord won the bigger marketshare due to being accessible from a browser and featureful. And it's a market where marketshare winner takes all, because of the need to exchange contact information with someone you just met on a platform you share.

ohithereyou• 7 years ago

My high school/college friends and I (we've been out of school for nearly 15 years at this point) moved to Discord from Mumble. Here were our reasons why:

* persistent text chat - we're spread across different time zones, and the ability to talk separated by time without having to resort to a forum is very nice, pinging someone with a question or with a reminder for our next game and anime night is really nice; having a separate space from group SMS (which we don't really use) is nice because when I'm at work I can log out of Discord and not be bothered, and if I get an SMS I know that it's something that I have to deal with now

* consistent interface across mobile and desktop - it's nice to have a consistent, universal interface across desktop (Mac, Linux, Windows) and mobile (iOS and Android) versions; it's nice that there are multiple apps for Mumble, but that makes support more difficult

* built in screen sharing support - see support note above

* channel permissions - we have subgroups based on interest, listed in an announce channel, and people that want to join in on that discussion can, but people who are uninterested in, say, Warhammer, discussion don't even have that channel cluttering up their interface, nor do they have to explicitly mute it

* push notifications - see ping above, it's nice

* better bot integration - for me, anyway, it's easier to integrate bots into Discord than it is for Mumble - this is subjective

Those are just the reasons I could think of off the top of my head. I would love to be able to self-host our Discord server, and if it had existed at the level of maturity that it is at now, I probably would have suggested moving to Matrix or something similar.

yay_cloud2• 7 years ago

For me, this is fantasy hockey. I don't even like to watch hockey anymore, but I enjoy the daily interaction with my friends who are no longer in the same city and busy with their own lives.

momokoko• 7 years ago

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.

But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.

This was common knowledge until we had a generation will cell phones which greatly reduced the amount of informal regularly scheduled events. In large part because coordination is not nearly as difficult so there is less push to just set something up that occurs once every two weeks as opposed to jus doing it last minute via group chat.

neilv2• 7 years ago

Or weekly/frequent religious community gatherings.

People who aren't familiar with that might not appreciate the community aspect.

For example, for some flavor of American Catholics, much of a normal Sunday can be blown (as far as the kids are concerned) by dressing up in Sunday best clothes, attending the big folk music mass, the chatter as people spill out of the church and maybe also talk with the priest out back after the procession out, followed by hours of "coffee and donuts" socializing in the parish's school cafeteria or meeting hall.

I'm not that kind of religious, but that's one way to find and maintain friendships, as well as sense of community and mutual support.

neilv2• 7 years ago

A comment that sounded sincere was deleted while I responded to it.

Quick answer: I mentioned a religious congregation because I thought it wasn't well-known in HN circles.

My intent was actually to use this as an opportunity to try to explain something I know about some complicated group. All of us fellow humans have so much misunderstanding between so many groups, contributing to conflict and disrespect, often for no good reason.

(For example, religious/cultural congregations aren't just about doctrine and dogma passed down from parents -- or often aren't even about that at all, for many people -- but are often things that people are in for reasons we can maybe appreciate and understand. Then we can address actual problems better, together.)

mises• 7 years ago

Can second. I grew up in a Protestant Church like this, and it's a great community. Nice and welcoming people are sometimes rare these days.

I can't help but think that it's just not "cool" to be religious. It's seen as things our parents did, and every one wants to be an edgy atheist. For better or for worse, humans drew community from their churches (or other religious institutions) for a very long time. Churches were uniquely well-suited to "scale" with modern life and urbanization, especially compared to other traditional communities. I'm not saying you have to be any specific religion; I'm guessing many other religions are welcoming as well. But pick something where you can find a community of friendly people who share your values (this is possibly most important).

Edit: I see that the parent comment has now felt compelled to apologize for suggesting that religion could be a good thing. That's pretty sad. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean it can't be a helpful thing for others. Quite frankly, I also believe it's helpful for mental health. Believing that when you die you will just disappear is a rather depressing worldview, and I know people with serious health issues who are atheists and are struggling with that. Same with many aging people. On the other hand, being able to "offer something up to God" can be quite cathartic and an excellent way to relive stress.

Priests were the therapists of olden days.

Edit 2: For further clarification, here's my response to those who say "just gather like-minded people". It's much harder to do that without religion. The best definition of religion I ever heard was "an ideology that provides a comprehensive worldview". In other words, something that shapes your perspective on and understanding of every thing else. It is not easy to find such a group of people who share such basic understandings and values without the use of religion.

cwp• 7 years ago

Yup, that's a regularly scheduled recurring event, alright.

impostir• 7 years ago

Disclaimer: I grew up in that environment, community Catholic, and am now an atheist.

I never enjoyed the Sunday gatherings, I was an angry child, but leaving it does give me perspective on why people stay. It gives you a real sense of community that most people I know don't have. It connects you with people, hell my family wouldn't have any friends without their parish. Religion, specifically Catholicism, has a lot of problems, but their are legitimate reasons why the vast majority of people hold onto them.

e40• 7 years ago

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events. Whether its a cookout every other Sunday, a Friday happy hour, Thursday night online gaming, or anything really.

That is obviously true, but I had never thought of it that way. This is one of the most insightful HN comments I've read in a long, long time. Thank you.

Justsignedup• 7 years ago

This also highlights why church or other community events are so hard to leave. All religious nonsense aside, this creates a space for people to just hang out and get some socializing in, create lasting relationships.

Also explains why it is so hard to leave a game. You're not leaving a game, you're leaving the community you've been playing with. This is why org nights are so important, its how you get together on a schedule.

This is also why it is better to be in an event that everyone in the family can participate in, since it is so important for you not to miss.

nlawalker• 7 years ago

But it must be a recurring event that does not need to be planned each time, but not going is still considered something you are cancelling.

The tough part about recurring events is that they're always lower priority than anything emergent, because they're going to happen again. A mildly uncooperative two year old or middling-priority work task likely won't prevent you from attending a one-time event, but an every-other-week happy hour? Yeah, sorry, can't make it this time...

The trick is finding a large enough interval such that missing an instance feels like a real loss.

Tade0• 7 years ago

To maintain relationships as an adult you need regularly scheduled recurring events.

Or somebody willing to go the extra mile and gather everyone regularly.

I have such a person in my circle of friends from college - he organizes get-togethers which include me even though I've been out of town since 2015.

Given the distance I usually vodkonference.

scandinavegan• 7 years ago

I run a face-to-face pen-and-paper RPG one night every other week for a group of friends. Some of them I've actually met through this campaign. We've been going for many years and when people ask how me make it work, my number one suggestion is the same as yours: pick a day of the week and stick to it.

Pick a cadence that is fast enough so that you don't forget what you did last time, but is also slow enough so that you have time for other things in your life and have time to look forward to it. It can be every week if that works for everyone, or every other week, or once a month. For us it's every other week.

One feature of having a fixed day is that it's possible for everyone to schedule other stuff around the activity. But the best part is that you don't have to spend a week coordinating peoples' schedules, having to decide if the player that "prefers" Monday gets to decide over the player who "prefers" Tuesday, and so on. At the start of every other week, it's already there in the calendar.

Also, since everyone in the group has jobs and kids now, people will miss sessions now and then. I've decided to play anyway, as long as we're at least two players plus the game master. If we were to wait for everyone to be available, we would always cancel, because someone is almost always away. We just pretend their characters are busy and decide at the start of next session what they did, or they float along as spectres with the group without interacting. If they hold quest items, we just give them to another character for a session, and so on. We make it easy to drop in and out.

I'm a player in another group that insists that everyone is present, and we have six-month gaps between sessions that are supposedly bi-weekly because there are always sick kids or deadlines at work for someone.

hnick• 7 years ago

This seemed very artificial to me, until I realised we had this recurring event to an extreme degree earlier in life - it was just called school.

JeffL• 7 years ago

I was playing a Moba with my brother almost every day, talking on voice while we played. I had to quit because the Moba was really sucking up all my drive and free time, but after quitting, I really missed talking with my brother. I started playing again for that reason, but had to quit again, because in the year and a half I was playing that game, I really got nothing done other than have lots of fun and piss off my wife. Of course I never call my brother on the phone otherwise, I have no reason to. I have a really hard time finding a middle ground, but the social aspect of gaming is definitely one of the strong positives for me.

ducttape122• 7 years ago

Why not agree to play once or twice a week? For example, every Monday night, you two jump on for a few hours and play and catch up?

Also, what do you mean you got nothing done? You bonded with your brother. That seems pretty valuable to me!

watwut3• 7 years ago

I am not him, but for me "nothing done" in similar situation meant that I did not learned new programming related things despite needing to, did not contributed to household chores as much as I should, deteriorated/neglected relationships with people actually around me and nearby, personal projects did not moved and stuff I was supposed to organize was not organized.

A lot of these games are designed in a way that makes them less fun when played only a little. Or you become a drag on the team. There are also long term quests and you need to be present to participate.

An explocite agreement on playing twice a week breaks "plausible deniality" here. For some reason it is hard to admit that we are doing it for social reasons. It would be like calling brother on the phone directly - the same block preventing you one action prevents the other.

ben_jones• 7 years ago

Not him but for me gaming has really sapped my attention span and intrinsic motivations. Before or after a "session" I find myself still thinking about the game and my brain still wired to play the game, versus the other sorts of "zones" you can find yourself in such as to exercise, read, meditate, cook, do errands, etc. I go back and forth on playing games (1 month on, 3 months off ish) - but its always quitting cold turkey. There is probably a business venture in keeping people productively busy in order to get over a gaming fetish.

cheez• 7 years ago

This is a wholesome version of that new Black Mirror episode. The one with the polar bear. I will say no more.

Funes-• 7 years ago

Like others his age, Gill says that his close friendships from high school and college have atrophied, not only because of the distance but because of their mutual aversion to talking on the phone.

I'll take the liberty to illustrate my own experience: my number of friendships and acquaintances has incredibly declined not because of any personal aversion to voicecalls, but to texting and social media.

I've noticed how, gradually, people I'm frequently around have grown more and more reluctant not only to pick up a phone call but also--and more importantly--to engage in face-to-face interaction, something I find absolutely essential to fulfill one's social needs to a deeply satisfying extent. Not having an online, public presence makes you irrelevant to a lot of people. In some countries, for example, not using WhatsApp is plain social suicide.

tluyben22• 7 years ago

Maybe I am reading this wrong, but I guess I have the opposite experience. With phonecalls I had issues because I have serious tinnitus and have had that since I was young (played in metal bands and was a real man so no earplugs...). Since chatting became normal I made more solid friendships then I ever did in person and definitely then on the phone. I chat like we are sitting together which people find akward at first but then they seem to like it. It is not very different after a while if it is face to face vs writing 1000s of lines of text in some chat client. And the conversations are usually more profound; no noise, no drinking and time to ponder answers and questions.

Face to face I personally still prefer but I notice my younger friends do not and that is fine.

I have been making (and losing them as well; especially the ones I made in my teens: we have nothing at all in common anymore mostly) real friends (as in people that click fast and you talk with day and night if the opportunity is there) over 30 and over 40; those were met online via sideprojects, company buys and sells and some of them I have never met.

kazagistar3• 7 years ago

no noise, no drinking

I strongly recommend casual wandering walks for anyone without mobility issues as a bar replacement. I don't even remember where I picked up the habit, but I never was really introduced to bars until later, and they always seemed inferior and have shown a few of my friends the benefits of walking around outside and having a chat (sobriety optional).

ducttape122• 7 years ago

Chatting can be difficult for men. As a man, we tend to not make points about chatting about our feelings or life. But, when our goal is video games / bowling / watching a football game / whatever else with downtime, well, the feelings or life conversations aren't our focus then. Loophole! (not to mention sometimes serious conversations can cause awkward silences. Everyone has the activity to turn back to.)

pessimizer3• 7 years ago

It can also be boring and annoying to talk about politics, the weather, or to gossip about people not present. Video games, like sports, offer a very detailed, completely trivial subject to talk about. Additionally, silence while watching or playing a game isn't dead (like silences at the holiday dinner table), it's a steady stream of new conversational material.

faitswulff2• 7 years ago

Having just watched the "Striking Vipers" Black Mirror episode, it was mildly frustrating watching men do everything but talk...

DonHopkins• 7 years ago

I don't know what you mean by frustrating. For a Black Mirror episode, it had such a happy ending!

faitswulff2• 7 years ago

Yeah, maybe I've spent too much time on r/sex and r/relationships. The answer is always communication! It's just surprising to me that someone could be in a relationship for 10+ years and not communicate everything, no matter how embarrassing or intimate.

randomvectors• 7 years ago

First thing that popped in my head when I read the headline. Really liked the episode.

petra• 7 years ago

Why hasn't this caught on for watching TV together, online ?

javagram• 7 years ago

A lot of people dislike talking while watching TV together.

FWIW, Xbox used to have this feature back in 2009-10. You could synchronize a video with up to 4 friends and watch Netflix or movies/tv from the Zune store with them over party chat in a virtual theater. The screen could be full screen or you could zoom out a bit and make your avatars emote while watching.

They discontinued the feature after a couple years saying it wasn’t very used.

rocky1138• 7 years ago

It's socially unacceptable to talk over a movie or TV show, but welcomed when talking over videogames.

anon42427• 7 years ago

This probably has something to do with a movie/TV show is a ready-made story you mentally dive into while a multiplayer game session is a story that you create together. In the first case talking is disrupting while in the second it's part of the story.

manfredo• 7 years ago

I used to play WoW with a childhood friend on the other side of the country. Unlike MOBAs, I find that WoW is (or at least was during BC and WotLK) are mindless enough that you can actually hold a real conversation.

knolax• 7 years ago

That has been my experience. Friendships are best formed and maintained by working towards some mutual goal or at the very least regular interaction. In the absence of physical proximity games are pretty much the only recreational option.

papeda• 7 years ago

As for many things, there's a nice Knausgaard quote about this:

That’s what distance does; when the time between conversations gets longer, intimacy diminishes, the little things connected to one’s daily life lose their place, it seems odd to talk about a shirt you just bought or to mention you’re thinking of leaving the dishes until morning when you haven’t spoken to a person for two weeks or a month, that absence would seem instead to call for more important topics, and once they begin to determine the conversation there’s no turning back, because then it’s two diplomats exchanging information about their respective realms in a conversation that needs to be started up from scratch, in a sense, every time, which gradually becomes tedious, and eventually it’s easier not to bother phoning at all, in which case it’s even harder the next time, and then suddenly it’s been half a year of silence.

I'm a guy and I like phone calls to friends, but I let them wander organically with little pressure. Of course, my friends and I have lives where it's not a big deal to set aside an hour or two for meandering conversation, and not everybody does. But wandering conversation is such a high-utility activity for me that I'm happy to do so. At any rate, it beats watching Netflix or whatever by a mile -- I remain confused by how many people say they have no time for friends but also consume a bunch of solo entertainment. I guess if your free time comes in unpredictably scheduled half hour blocks it might simultaneously be hard to plan hangouts and easy to watch TV, but I don't think most people have that kind of life, outside of maybe certain sets of parents of young children?

agumonkey2• 7 years ago

The quote is very interesting but I'd add something. Most of our dreads started after teenagehood, when social bonding was of high importance. Yet it often becomes a diplomatic effort, often void of real emotion. Real is too strong, but it's not vibrant nor fun most of the time. It's smalltalk. And we keep at it because as an adult it's deemed very important, even though, younger, relationships didn't center around mild chat, it was about having fun, cracking jokes, sharing a childish venture, getting something happy about the interaction.

ps: ah well, universe is poking fun at me, a very old friend just sent me a text after many months :)

roymurdock• 7 years ago

Call them back!

dorchadas• 7 years ago

Off topic, but seeing as you seem to have read some: where should one start with Knausgaard? I've been hearing more and more about him, and want to get a taste, but don't know where to start.

majos• 7 years ago

I think Volume 1 of My Struggle is a good starting point. That series sounds intimidating -- six volumes averaging maybe 500 pages, written by a gloomy-looking Scandinavian, with an ominous and provocative title -- but Knausgaard is crazy readable. And the first book immediately gets to work showing you how, what, and why he writes.

mmsimanga2• 7 years ago

Not sure if it is something I picked up from my dad but I hardly chat to friends I have made over the years. As I have grown older I have gotten closer to my family including extended family. When I do meet with my friends we kick off as if we last saw each other yesterday yet sometimes it is a good 5,10 or even 15 years since we last met. The older I get the more memories I seem to have that include my family so I just focus on them. Not to say I don't talk to other people but I make way more effort and it seems much easier to talk to family. Maybe it is an African thing most of us are big on extended family. My uncle is a good 15 years older than me. Growing up he was an adult now we both adults so we can converse on the same level. Same with my dad.

52-6F-62• 7 years ago

Nah you just described me and my father to an extent. There are variables, but what you described really sounded familiar. And my dad’s side is Scottish.

My mom is more social and cognizant if social needs (Irish). Though less so now that they’re getting older/retired.

I’m not sure how well it mixes with the norms of Canadian society here. Often feels a touch off-centre but not entirely out of place.

So maybe more a trait of people who just tend toward family over other social connections, and less a heritage thing?

mmsimanga2• 7 years ago

Thanks for sharing. Within the extended family different people grow into different roles. You have the aunt who everyone confides in she always tells you as it is whether you want to hear it or not. But since you know it is coming from a place of love its all good. In your 20s you do all the running around. Slaughtering whatever animal needs to be slaughtered. In your 30 and 40s you the ones that make sure things move. You help organise weddings, family meetups, funerals and so on. All these occasions tend to be big back home. Then you transition into a senior role where you act as an advisor to the 30 year olds organising everything. Finally when you are grandmother/father age you just an honoured guest who can do whatever they want :-). You become the joker, family historian ... whatever you want really.

blegblarh• 7 years ago

Man I can relate!

I met most of my closest friends in College and we graduated almost a decade ago and have ended up moving to different parts of the states but I keep in contact with most of them via a Discord server and play with some of them on a near daily basis.

It's really great since it feels like we are just hanging out in the dorm hall just shooting the shit.

brightball• 7 years ago

There’s a buddy of mine who I stay in touch with by playing Chess on a mobile app. We’ve had a game going at all times for probably 4 years now with a 3 day time limit on moves.

He’s a lot better than me. Overall record is something like 200-50, but it’s a simple way to keep in touch.

Other than that, all of my friends of college stay in touch because of college football. We all follow the team, get together at different away games and bowl games. Home games are actually tougher because most people come with a family routine for those.

DigitalTerminal• 7 years ago

And it really works. I can chat with my friends, talk during the game, but I'll never talk on the phone. Idk why, but it's nice to know that this is just not my way.

RichardHeart• 7 years ago

It's funny how s05e01 of Black Mirror addressesthis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Striking_Vipers

krsrhe• 7 years ago

That’s probably a why the article was written.

For Men Who Hate Talking on the Phone, Games Keep Friendships Alive

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