Despite my hesitation to commit to new projects at the moment, I’ve launched a new newsletter on social gaming called Metaplay. You can subscribe here if you’re interested.

My goal with this newsletter is to share semi-regular updates offering a mix of commentary and analysis, links, suggestions of new games to check out, the occasional interview, and screenshots of my latest Fortnite wins. To be honest I’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the initial response to the announcement and my hope is that you’ll find reading this to be useful and worth your time.

So why a newsletter on social gaming and why now? Because social is eating gaming. Even though online multiplayer gaming has been around since forever, there’s something that feels different and new about what’s happening right now. Games are becoming more like places we go to spend time with our friends, not just things we do to be less bored. A year into Covid we’ve all seen now how valuable playing videogames together can be, not just as a form of entertainment when we’re stuck at home, but as a way to foster, deepen, and maintain friendships during a time when few of us, especially kids, have had the opportunity to do much of that stuff in-person.

I wrote about why games can work so well as social experiences a few months ago and won’t repeat everything I wrote here, but there a couple of key points about how social games served a crucial function during a critical time that are worth reiterating:

• What social games are able to do (and which virtual worlds that aren’t games largely fail at) is to replace the anxiety of unstructured and unbounded social interactions with a highly structured scenario in which we literally have something to do and rules for how we do it.

• Social games provide a space for what are often considered to be the four key elements needed for friendships to develop: Proximity, Frequency, Duration, and Intensity.

It’s not surprising that games that provide structure to our social interactions and satisfy these four key elements of friendship (like Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Rec Room, Animal Crossing, etc) have exploded in popularity during a time when we couldn’t see our friends IRL. Social gaming was already growing pre-Covid, so even if patterns of usage shift as we start to go back to our normal lives, I’m convinced that games will remain a primary place where a lot of us socialize with our friends from here on out.