Published on 12, July, 2020
Hi, my daughter (21) would like to make friends with people with similar interests via gaming. She is on a 2 year break from university due to severe anxiety, agoraphobia and feels isolated but at the same time finds social interaction exhausting. She is really getting into pc gaming using games from Steam, but also has ps4. I was trying to do a bit of research for her to find best ways. I found something called Discord sites but I couldn't work out how to make sure it's a friendly site. My daughter is pretty savvy about keeping herself safe online so wouldn't be in danger of exploitation. However, she would find it upsetting if someone she felt she'd started to make a connection with turned out to be not very nice. She's stopped playing ps4 games online because of in game behaviour of a few people. She does find it hard to trust people now. She finds it easier to connect with people if there is a shared interest. Does anyone have any suggestions of appropriate ways to connect via gaming?
Thanks
Gaming is a very pleasurably absorbing interest, I'm a life long gamer starting with pong in the 1970s when I was erm .. younger.
When PvP (player verses player) games were becoming mainstream from the 2010s I saw immediately that there was an aggressive testosterone driven one-upmanship conducted by the male majority. But there you have it, a primarily male designed arena for normal childish male learning aggression. The substrate hasn't changed much except from becoming "more aware" of an increase of female players. For me PvP is what makes games bad (unless you're into PvP of course and if you are, more power to you) - it was always about us vs the machine for me, PvE (player vs Environment).
There is a greater presence of women in gaming today but the field is still very much male driven and targeted. But regardless, this is fantastic news, girls playing video games with boys. Community driven RPG's (Role Playing Games) are less transient than PvP gangs, more relaxing, just as exciting and make more meaningful and longer lasting virtual relationships.
Discord is the modern way to have a friend's list. As games are more prevalent, gaming communities go to new games every so often so Discord is a way to keep track of your gaming friends across several games. Better Discord channels are moderated decently in my experience. Unmoderated channels ought to be avoided, there are many official channels for games fans, dedicated to a single game, that you can join and still maintain your gaming friends list. I've used several of my own channels where like minded individuals are on private chats. Before Discord TeamSpeak3 was the go to VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol).
I use several anonymous email accounts for my gaming accounts. I have separate unlinked accounts for paying for services in those games and for buying more games.
Use formulaic passwords - that way you'll never forget a password to an account.
hah I do that do, different password for every account, no need to memorise :), only you know the key to decode it