I think there are two highly-related problems with the culture around multiplayer games these days, and they’re feeding off of each other to create a downward spiral of toxic sweatiness:

• we don’t have a cultural understanding of what it means to play a multiplayer game “casually” (not trying to win. enjoying the moment instead of going after an objective) anymore. we unconsciously assume that everyone is trying to win as hard as they can in every match, and we resent them if they aren’t playing as well as we want them to (this is a big part of where toxicity comes from)

• the vast majority of multiplayer games are not designed to facilitate casual play and are instead designed to put a lot of pressure on each individual player

devs see the culture of competitive sweatiness, so they design games with competitive sweatiness in mind. then players see a landscape of only competitive sweaty multiplayer games and start thinking of “multiplayer games” as inherently competitive and sweaty. and these two things feed off of each other

it also doesn’t help that there used to be a lot of money to be made in esports. so devs were also trying to chase the money with their esport bait games

it really, deeply frustrates me when people generalize about “multiplayer games” and it’s clear that what they’re talking about are hyper-competitive SBMM PvP games. it’s like they just… can not envision a multiplayer game that is not a hyper-sweaty pressure cooker skill creep rat race. and they can’t imagine that someone would be playing a game in order to enjoy the moment, or try out a weird or goofy strategy, or for any reason at all except to try to win as hard as they can

imagine a hero shooter where only the losing team gets to use their ults, there are lots of purely RNG mechanics that subtly favor the losing team like in Mario Kart, the teams get shuffled around if the players get too unbalanced, and there are twelve players on each team instead of six (to keep the pressure off of individual players). also, the game doesn’t keep track of who’s winning or who’s losing and there is no incentive to win. that’s what a non-sweaty game looks like

I think we need a lot more games that look like that - because we need to rebuild and normalize the cultural concept of “playing for fun” and make sure that there are games and gamemodes that cater to that. otherwise the toxicity problem is only going to get worse from here

@kasdeya dark souls 3 had one of my favorite casual competitive multiplayer, before they introduced the arena in the DLC. There was no arena when the game launched, so people found their own spots to host fights. The most popular one was outside the pontiff sulyvahn boss room, because you could summon friendlies, and get invaded by normal and faction invaders, so basically a lot of people could be in one host's world. The host wpuld then act like a proper host, and hold a little fight club! The friends and invaders would all fight 1v1, or 2v2, or whatever, at the pantomimed direction of the host. You die and go back to your world when you lose, so if it's over it's just over, no more goal. Find another club and try there. If you win, the host summons more people to fight, and the goal is the same as before, have fun fighting while you can, and chill with the host while the new folks connect (unless the host wants to fight).

There was also a lot of opportunity for being silly, becuase there was no voice chat, and you could only communicate with gestures, dropping shiny stones, a couple canned phrases in a silly voice, and dropping items. My favorite thing was, after winning several rounds, the host jumped into the arena with me, and dropped a "soul of a champion," for me to pick up. T_T

The game could be extremely sweaty outside of the fight clubs, but those were a good time. I think you could absolutely model a competitive multiplayer off of that and create something fun.

@kasdeya thank you for the post, i think you got to touch upon part of why i hate those competitive-type games so much. (and thank you for that quality post in general, i feel i see much better quality posts on fedi than anywhere else...)

@arni aww omg thank you! I’m glad that you liked it so much. and I do really like the culture on Fedi - so much more than any other online community