Online/Offline is a false dichotomy. There is no magic parallel world between online and offline. If you think alot of online discourse isn’t sincere, you need to take a closer look at the “offline world”. Most discourse in insincere. When you leave your job you leave your work friends (save the few who turn out to be real friends), leave college and lose your college friends (same caveat as work), the same with highschool or childhood friends or any other criteria you set. Most friends are not friends, never have been in history, and the Internet is just one more aspect of this.

Well, for me, the obviously conclusion would be that the play happened but they never wrote them up in posts. I know that sometimes I have the intention of writing up play in posts or on websites or what have you, and sometimes I get really into it and do it but if my time gets short, it’s not the play that suffers, but my desire to post about it online.

I take the time to organize, prep and run a game, and I do it despite the fact that I have a new baby and a number of close friends, who take up a portion of my time. I do it because the gaming group is made up of my close friends, friends that I cultivated over years of mostly gaming.

If there is a decline in friendship, it’s because we choose it – by being too lazy or self-absorbed to do the work that ongoing friendships require. But gaming has always, in my experience, been a place where friends are made and kept, far more so than almost any other activity, barring competitive sports.

Maybe. I think there’s a great lack of empathy in the scene right now, and many designs seem to assume no responsibility to be empathetic.

I think “hazing” is real in RPG culture, but not necessarily in texts, which were designed by scenes who’d finished the actual hazing. You’re absolutely right that friendship doesn’t eliminate pervasive social problems — but you will *never* solve those problems without it. Why should somebody care about sexism in RPGs (for example) when they don’t really give a shit about the ppeople they play with at all except as instruments for self-gratification?

A lot of online discourse is sincere, but a lot more of it isn’t. There are deep rooted reasons for this that can’t be waved away as semantics. We are tuned to understand people through a series of cues that are not all transmitted through common online media.

Any broad examination is going to catch outliers. In any event, I do think there’s a bigger chunk of gamers who don’t game much/at all (as opposed to people who’ve turned their back on gaming completely) now than there has been before.

People who write gaming blogs also game, and plenty of them don’t talk about it in their blogs because at least one survey had shown people find it boring. I think many of us instinctively knew this before the survey was out.

I’m not just talking about gaming blogs. In multiple online mediam descriptions of playing (or not playing) when they do appear are telling. I see people plan stuff weeks, months in advance and commit to describing sessions — but the sessions never materialize. Plus, RPG bloggers do blog about play a whole lot. I think I may be exceptional in *not* talking about my house games much.

The Geek Social Fallacies essay is interesting. I hadn’t seen it before; thanks for linking it. GSF1 makes things make a lot more sense to me. I see a lot of people complaining about problem gamers, and my response has always been, “So why do you game with them?” Now I get it.

It’s not without insight, but it’s not evidence-backed psychology, either, and its presence as a meme is not largely destructive.