When you think of the stereotypical gamer, what do you think of? Do you think of the lonely nerd sitting in their room, not talking to anybody and just focusing on the game on their screen? What if I told you that the stereotype was not even close to true anymore, how surprised would you be?

Sure there are some people that play video games that do fall into that category, where they don’t want to talk to anyone for one reason or another and instead escape through the virtual world from the physical world, but there is a lot of people that also spend time talking to each other and have built communities around games.

PS3 Controller and a Video Game on-screen (Credit: Pexels via Pixabay)

For gamers, there is one application that has raised above the rest for talking to and making friends through the online world to play games with, and that application is Discord. Think of it as a giant office, where different departments have their own rooms, but in this case the departments are different games, and each room is a server for people to hang out in and talk in.

This has seemingly erased that stereotype of the lonely gamer. Now there are servers that can have north of hundreds of people present in a given server, spending time in voice chats with each other, and create friendships that span over potentially hundreds of kilometers in distance.

People with the same interests in games spend time together, and have developed their own shorthand for common sayings in each game, creating a language shorthand that, for a lot of circumstances, would not be understood outside of their shared circle of friends.

This has led to people that previously would have only stayed in their rooms, or hidden their interests to feel more comfortable showing the world what they have interests in, and finding the communities that make them feel welcome as well.

These friendships don’t just stay online, instead there will be in person meetings as well. Sometimes is local for when members find out that they live close to each other, and they go meet at a specific place nearby that everyone can meet at. Other times it’s at big events, such as TwitchCon, where they will travel with the sole purpose of meeting the friends that they spend their time talking to online.

So maybe it’s true that there’s some games that spend all day alone an in their rooms, but instead spend their time building communities and a culture around their game, and friends all around the world.