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
Thanks for all these suggestions. I'll sit down and have a proper read through of all the information. I know from what my daughter has said she doesn't like pvp games because she finds them stressful. She prefers cooperative mission type games. I know she is on discord but says that she doesn't connect with anyone because she has no friends to connect with. It's either that she doesn't know about joining groups (seems unlikely) or she is nervous of joining random groups. I know that she has thing (which I also have to some extent) where she feels she has to be "invited" to join something. I think she is very sensitive to rejection and doesn't like to "impose". She plays most of her pc games on Steam. Are there Steam game groups on Discord? I have to approach this carefully and respectfully with her as she is an adult and I don't want to seem patronising or interfering to her. She has pda also so I don't want finding friends to be a pressure. Thanks again for your help.
I'm happy to illustrate how great it is that opposite to the much publicised doom and gloom is the reality of the modern gaming ecosystem. Us players control it so the more nicer players there are, our ecosystem will organically become nicer.
The way its worked for me in the past is I use the in-game text chat system for comms with people I encounter in games for teams, party, open world events etc. The more I play and learn the more I become recognised as my in game character and my skill in that game (its brilliant fun). So I might get a bit more serious about a particular game and think VOIP could be useful here so someone has a channel for that small group and these smaller groups are the most friendly gaming groups I've experienced. People move into and out of such channels all the time as tastes in gaming change. Stay in the nice ones, leave and block the nasty ones.
Steam is a great platform, any gamer should have steam.