Trends and the Social Media

Trends and Social Media

Just like buying the trendiest clothes, wearing the hottest colour right new, watching the most popular TV show or using the most "in" slang, we'd all like to be on top of our game. To keep up with society and the most popular thing right now. Games are no different. I remember when Diablo III came out and my Facebook feed was filled with "omg look what I've got, this is gonna be my life for the next 3 days", or "so exciting, just got new Diablo", and all of a sudden everyone was commenting, liking, wanting, or being jealous at someone else having it. It was most certainly the "trend" back then. It felt like if you didn't know what it was, you were totally out and not just in the gaming world but also in the social world. So are trends one of the big reasons why some games are so popular? Is it because everyone wants to feel like they're part of the next biggest thing? Do people play it just for the sake of playing it?

I have many friends who started playing Tetris on Facebook because all of our other friends were battling and talking about it every day. They said it felt like if they didn't start playing, they couldn't be part of the circle and felt left out of conversations. I'm sure everyone knows the game Draw Something which was so popular a while back. Having to not own an Iphone or a smart phone meant that I was listening to my friends talk about this game every day and being with them whilst they're playing the game with others. So it feels like the social media and the pressure of maintaining friendship also plays in with why games may be so popular.

            
            Clint Worley, the senior producer on Sony’s “EverQuest” (or “Evercrack,” to the   afflicted),             says it’s not the games themselves that are addictive — it’s the social aspects of the                         massively multiplayer genre.
             
            “The social networking is really kind of the glue that pushes people to sit in the game for             long periods of time,” he says.
             
            Dr. Hilarie Cash, a Redmond, Wash.-based therapist who specializes in Internet and                     computer addiction, agrees. She works with lots of teenagers and young men in their 20s who             don’t have a lot going on in the real world. So they play online games to fill   the void of             friendship, companionship — even love.

Multi-member online games means there are chances to meeting new friends on the web, to create a virtue life where the other person may not know you on a personal level to judge you so it can be the perfect platform of escape of some people. If we become too reliant on this, it may become an addiction. So does the social media and the pressure to conform force people to become "gamers" and is it one of the reasons for addiction? All I can say is that on a personal level, the pressure to know what the hell my friends were on about some of time made me try a variety of games just for the sake of knowing.