Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Gaming is a Social Activity, Goddammit

This last weekend, I delivered the keynote address at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

PAX is a huge gathering of gamers of all sorts: table top gamers, retro gamers, FPS gamers, handheld gamers, and every other type of gamer imaginable.

I was excited to deliver the keynote, but also terrified. The average age of a PAX participant is around 26, which is significantly younger than me at a crusty old 35.

I worked my ass off to come up with something relevant to this crowd, and settled on a brief history of arcade and console gaming before I hit the real point I wanted to make. You can hear the entire keynote (and read some of my personal highlights from PAX) here, but this excerpt illustrates one of the main points I wanted to make: gaming is a social activity, and gamers are not anti-social freaks.

When my Wii arrived, I named it “Wii-ton” (HA!) and from the moment I plugged it in and started playing Wii Sports with my kids, I felt the magical excitement and pure joy of playing a video game that I haven't felt since my brother and I spent every waking hour playing NES twenty years ago. I knew I’d come across something, uh, Revolution-ary in gaming. When we got Warioware, and had way too much fun making total asses of ourselves jumping around and posing, I understood why: the Wii is about playing games together. The reason I play Wii games more than anything other than Guitar Hero is that it’s a social gaming experience, just like playing Combat or Dodge’Em on Atari, all of those games on NES, or getting friends together for an MKIII or NHL Hockey session on Genesis.

This is the thing that drives me crazy when I hear Jack Thompson, Hillary Clinton, LA City Attorney Rocky Delgadillio, or any other opportunistic, pandering, condescending politician lecture us about the alleged dangers of video games as some sort of anti-social activity. Gaming. Is. A. Social. Activity. Whether we’re playing an analog table top game in someone’s dorm room, a console game in our living rooms, or meeting up in an Online MMORPG with Leeroy Jenkins, we are engaging in an inherently social activity.

The only thing anti-social about gaming are those few people who are so perfectly described by John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and while they’re annoying, at least they aren’t trying to tell us what we can and can’t play.

The social activity of gaming is part of the foundation of my outstanding relationships with both of my stepsons, too. When I bought Super Mario Bros. on Virtual Console, I asked my seventeen year-old stepson to play with me, eager to share with him some of the joy I'd experienced when I was just a few years younger than he is now.

As I entered level 1-4, he said, "Wil, remember: you have to jump over the chain of fire and onto the top of the box."

"Listen here, sonny," I said, in my best Very Grumpy Old Man voice, "I was playing this game when you were in short pants!"

"Yeah," he said, "so was I."

"That's funny," I said, "because it's true."

We’ve had countless moments like this one, whether he’s owning me in Guitar Hero or Halo, kicking my ass in MarioKart, or asking me to help him make MAME work on his MacBook. I’ve heard parents complain that video games are bad for kids, or harmful to their emotional development, but I’ve never seen a video game reduce a kid to tears as effectively as one of those screaming, hyper competitive little league dads. I’ve never known a kid to feel like crap about himself because he can’t win a Pokemon battle, but I’ve known plenty whose parents make them think they’re worthless because they don’t want to play football.

Speaking of parents and children and video games and opportunistic, pandering politicians: it’s none of their fucking business what I choose to play with my kids, and I wish they’d stop trying to tell me – and everyone else by extension – what my kids can and can’t play. I didn’t let my kids play violent or graphic games when they were too young to understand what the game was about because I’m a good parent who is involved in his kids’ lives, not because some idiot politician tried to score easy political points with the authoritarian 20 percenters who think censorship is totally awesome.

I wouldn’t let my kids play Vice City – even though I loved it and played it nightly for months after they’d gone to bed – because I felt it was too graphic and explicit for them. When my son turned 17, he wanted to know if he could play it, and called me while I was in Las Vegas for business to get permission.

"Mom wanted me to call you and find out if it was okay for me to play Vice City,” he said when I picked up the phone. “I think it's okay, because I'm seventeen and everything, but mom said she wasn't sure and wanted me to talk to you about it since you've played it."

Ryan is 18 and in college now, but even at 17 he was an incredibly mature and responsible person. I knew that he understood the difference between reality and video games, and I was actually more concerned about the time he spent playing them, than the content of the game.

"Well," I said, "you're seventeen, so you're able to buy yourself tickets to rated 'R' movies, and Vice City isn't much different than, say, Scarface or Goodfellas, but hold on a second and let me think about it, okay?"

"Okay," he said.

I put the phone to my chest, and explained the situation to my friends.

"Does he know that it's not okay to hit beat a hooker with a baseball bat and get his money back in real life?" my friend Ryan said.

"Good question," I said. I put the phone back to my ear and said, "I have to ask you one question: if you pick up a hooker in real life, is it okay to hit her with a baseball bat to get your money back after she gets out of your car?"

"Well, since hookers are empty shells and not real people," he said, "then yes. Yes. It's okay to whack her with a baseball bat."

I relayed this to the table and added, "I think he's mature enough to handle Vice City."

"Tell him that he he also has a future career in Hollywood," Ryan said.

That was a year ago, and even though he played all the way through the game, he never did whack a hooker, or do a drive by, or blow up a mall, or go for an INSANE STUNT BONUS by jumping over a canal in a stolen car. He did, though, get emotionally invested in the characters and their stories. He was sad when the game was over, because he wouldn’t get to spend any more time with them.

I had a similar reaction when I completed San Andreas. I knew these characters, I cared about these characters, and I was genuinely sad when their stories came to an end. I frequently feel this way when I finish a long novel, and occasionally at the end of a movie, but never so acutely as I did after over 100 hours of San Andreas. Whenever I hear one of these aforementioned douchebags pontificate about how dangerous and antisocial and devoid of redeeming qualities video games are, I get a little stabby, because these games we love to play are much, much more than the simplistic bloodbaths Mass Media likes to portray them as during May sweeps.

Just as the multiplayer games are social activities, so are the single-player games narrative works of art, and they should be treated that way.

And incidentally? They’re fun! And isn’t that what all this is about? We play games because they challenge us. We play games because they distract us. We play games because they give us bonding experiences with our friends and families. But most of all, we play games because they bring us joy.

Wil Wheaton says, "Don't be a dick!"