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‘Seeking connection’: the video game (Arc Raiders) where players stopped shooting and started talking... (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 6 days ago by artwork@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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It seems like the following is indeed interesting, yet I've never ever experienced Arc Raiders myself! Have you? ^^

But often, players are just talking. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, inspired by the photographer who interviews strangers in New York City, includes conversations with randomly encountered players. They talk about family struggles, work lives, depression, autism and, in one case, a lung collapse. In one conversation, a heavily armed player in green armour named Poopy candidly asks another raider: "What’s it like having kids, dude?”

When I first jumped into Arc Raiders, I found a dichotomy on the topside, where birds sing and plants thrive among the carcasses of downed machines. The more I wandered around this 1970s-style retro-future setting, the more I bumped into other humans, many of whom offered help, such as medical supplies. Mostly we snuck around and battled robots together. It was tense at times, sometimes scary, but often relaxing.

In one session, I encountered another player with a British accent who was also new to the game. "Have you been killed by another person yet?” he asked me, as we explored a burst concrete dam complex. "Because every person I’ve met has been friendly,” he added. "No one kills each other."

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[-] malle_yeno@pawb.social 21 points 6 days ago

My experience has been the adoption of Discord for communication in game has been a negative factor in the social aspects of gaming. Before, games needed to implement their own comms, which would encourage players to communicate as part of the game experience. But now it's expected that you'd talk on discord instead, so there's less need for games to be a social experience.

[-] drosophila 3 points 5 days ago

I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like "Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms" ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you've never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.

With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you'll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.

this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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