Gone are the days where children and teens stay up late on Friday nights playing with their joysticks at sleepovers.
Over the past ten years, gaming has been taken to an all new sociable limit, while at the same time taking most of it away.
But are children still interacting in the same way that they used to over their computer games?
Of course, it is all done online now, over wireless modems and wireless controllers, rather than sat with one another in the same room, and there has been some discussion in the mainstream media as to whether this has made people (yes adults) less sociable.
Clay Routledge, a professor Psychology at North Dakota State University seems to think that there are actually great advantages to the way that modern gamers are interacting with each other.
In an article in Psychology Today he states that:
“If playing antisocial (e.g., violent) games can lead to antisocial behavior, it makes sense to propose that playing prosocial games can lead to prosocial behavior.
Interestingly, he also states that research does in fact support this proposal. The University of Sussex recently carried out experiments where participants played prosocial games (using the example of Lemmings) and neutral games (using the example of Tetris).
Fascinatingly, those who played the prosocial games were more likely to engage in helpful behaviours.
But does this work across all platforms?
To say that there was no such market fifteen years ago, recent gaming news suggests that the industry is set to be worth a colossal $83bn by 2016 and $100bn by 2017. And this shows, with games constantly on the advance, they are becoming more functional, more innovative and more importantly, more sociable.
This is great for people who love to keep up with their friends by partaking in everything from freebets games or just chilling out on the commute home.
With this in mind however, people have started asking just what’s going to happen next for social mobile games.
Juilien Codorniou at Techcrunch says that:
“Mobile games are better when they are social for one simple reason: Games are more fun with friends. Games have always been social, from backgammon and chess to board games.
“Along the way, friends have been a central part of the game experience, including how we discover, play and talk about games. Social design concepts work wherever people are playing games – on desktop web and increasingly on mobile.”
So it would seem that sociable gaming can only get better, and even though we might not be in the same room as our friends computer games are just as sociable as ever; knocking old school out of the park.
