Mashed Articles

Previously I’ve talked of my almost entirely anti-social attitude. A quick recap, grump-fans: I’m a git. I don’t really like other people very much. I find it hard to activate myself properly in social situations. I hate crowds, and I tire of standard conventions and social norms even more quickly than I tire of most popular music acts. You’d call me a hipster if I wasn’t so fat and poorly dressed.

It won’t surprise you to learn that my social malaise has now extended its reach to Twitter. The signal-to-noise ratio has skewed entirely the wrong way for me. If people aren’t bleating endlessly about the latest hot-button topic, organising ‘movement’ hashtags that could never even hope to change the world, or retweeting people with hundreds of thousands of followers in an attempt to get noticed, they’re using Twitter to complain about all of the above.

The service, sadly, has become a victim of itself. I rarely find myself wanting to join the crowd, and when I do, I don’t feel I’ll be heard anyway. It’s like being in a board meeting with a group of shouting humans who’ve all been told they’re the CEO of the world when in fact they’re each an idiot locked in a basement, bawling their torrid thoughts only at the people that choose to listen through a pipe in the ceiling. The thought of entering that stinking dungeon (or pressing my ear against the damp listen-pipe) does nothing for me any more.

To quell my need for validation and peace, I’ve started using Google+. I’ll let you know what I think of that over the coming issues.

Twitter isn’t alone. I’ve always felt the same about multiplayer games on the internet. It’s obvious why: strap on a headset, enter the world of Xbox Live and you’ll be accosted by the unbroken voices of a hundred teenagers, chirping racial or homophobic slurs directly at your mother. Fail to play without the proper form or technique and you will be reduced to dust in seconds. Unless you’re masochistic, incredibly skilled or, I guess, offensively young, it’s not an environment to play in.

But one weekend, not long ago, I think I found the multiplayer game for me. It’s called Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator. As the title suggests, it simulates the bridge of a spaceship called the Artemis. A room full of laptop-toting crew members must help a nominated captain – who has no controls, just a main viewscreen – navigate through space and destroy hordes of naughty bad-guy ships.

Star Trek references have been deliberately banned, but the influence is there. The crew, for example, consists of Helm, Weapons, Science, Communications, and Engineering – posts from the Trek universe, all of which are essential to the proper running of the Artemis. Your ship, which currently navigates in a 2D plane of space because 3D would be fun-removingly complicated, has photon torpedoes and a warp drive. You are piloting the Enterprise in spirit, if not in name.

Playing Artemis, once we’d worked out a few technical issues, was amazing. It’s frantic, and it’s noisy, and most importantly it’s incredibly fun. It brings out a sense of camaraderie and social excitement that geeks like me rarely get to experience. Taking on a role on the ship feels like a great sense of responsibility, and bridge formality – addressing your captain as ‘Captain’ rather than ‘Andy’, for example – comes naturally. As captain, it’s even more intense; you’re coordinating commands to various stations, attempting to listen to everything going on in the room, all while making tactical decisions and shouting ‘Engage!’ as much as possible.

We played from 11pm to 2.30am. We will play again. Several of the crew are already working on XML-driven missions, myself included, that will properly challenge future captains. And it’s worth pointing out that this wasn’t an all-geek crowd. I’ve never even seen a few of the people who were in the room use a computer or watch Star Trek, but they all picked up Artemis and manned their stations expertly. There’s something in the game that… makes it so.

My point is simple: digital social interaction isn’t about begging for Farmville seeds on Facebook. It’s not about screaming about the news like you’re some kind of deity-spawned nu-journalist. It’s not about calling people names for shooting you in the head. It’s about getting together with real friends and doing something that brings you closer. It’s about making that constant shouting mean something. It’s about dragging yourself out of your usual mire and having a good time. That’s what playing Artemis felt like to me.