I was approached by a friend a few weeks ago that was writing a paper for his Journalism course. He asked me a bunch of questions about video games and the video game industry, nothing really out of the ordinary. Then he asked me how I thought video games affected my social life or lack there of. This question is by far the most interesting one I have been asked in a long time.

Video games have been slowly creeping into households for more than a decade now. What most people don't realize is that video games are not just for the nerdy, socially awkward dorks anymore. Many people play video games with groups on a regular basis. Instead of sitting down to watch a movie or even going out to a movie for that matter people might instead play a few levels of Halo 2. It is not uncommon to see family game night turn away from the traditional board game and opt for the video game. With video games appealing to more and more people of all ages you can expect this trend to increase. However, I play dozens of hours of games a week, so I broke them down to see just how social I really was.

Monday- On Monday I chose to play Blizzard's (relatively) new MMORPG World of Warcraft. These games are very social considering the huge community and the fact that everything works better with a team. I played this game with my roommate and some of our other friends.

Tuesday- I played Halo 2 with my room mates and one of our friends. We had enough to do 4-player split screen and we also played with some people around the world using Xbox Live.

Wednesday- Today was a day off from gaming. I did still log onto World of Warcraft for a few minutes to check my auctions and see what my guild was up to.

Thursday- We juggled a few videogames around today. We played some Ghost Recon 2 on cooperative mode, which is very fun but extremely challenging. Then we played some Burnout 3. All of these activities were with my roommates.

Friday- A group of my friends were around because of the vacation time so they ended up at my apartment. We decided to play Halo 2 8-player because we are lucky enough to have 2 Xboxes and 2 TVs. This lasted for a while but then some people didn't want to play anymore. Others still wanted to play something so we had a round robin with the Gamecube and Super Mario Kart: Double Dash. This was great because if you lost you would get a break, also this game is appealing even to my friends that are girls (they frown upon First Person Shooters).

So for me and my group of friends, videogames have become part of our normal social activities. When I was first doing this feature I thought that people wouldn't believe that someone who likes videogames as much as I do actually has a social life. More and more of my friends that are not into gaming are asking me if I will play with them.

- Seth (17-Jan-2005)

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