third places haven't disappeared, they've just gone digital
there’s been a lot of discourse lately about the “loneliness crisis”, and the decline of “third places” (public or semi-public places to go hang out and socialize that aren’t home or work) is often identified as one of the main causes. the disappearance of third places did seem to track with my own experience when i thought about it… for many years i never went anywhere besides school (close enough to work) and home, i was so addicted to minecraft that i’d rush home after class, get on the computer, and log in to the multiplayer server where i was one of the well-known “regulars” with the most playtime… i always thought this was really weird of me, but a lot of that time wasn’t even spent playing the game in the usual way, i would just run around in circles fiddling with stuff while hanging out and shooting the shit in chat with the other regulars- WAIT a second! coming in after work, idle chat with familiar faces, blowing off steam… maybe my in-game behavior wasn’t as odd as i thought, doesn’t that sound exactly like being a regular at a bar?
as soon as i had that realization, other examples of “third places in games” from my past immediately came to mind - mmos (club penguin was the first one that came to mind…), team fortress 2 community servers, “atmospheric” roblox minigames without any actual gameplay… i’ve even heard of a few games like VRchat created from the ground up to serve as digital hangout spaces. then it occurred to me that i’ve also been in many game-adjacent online spaces like discord servers that served as third places too, people showing up and hanging out in the same chatrooms or voice channels with the usual crowd every evening, no virtual representation of physical space even required, no need for them to be focused around something specific like video games either - pure digital third places.
why have so many third places transitioned online? i have a handful of theories… maybe the most uncharitable is that people are simply lazy and it’s much easier to stay home and sit in front of the computer instead of going out, especially in the united states where that almost always requires driving. activities popular with young people have also shifted online in general - drinking and partying are out, gaming and doomscrolling is in. another possibility is that the internet allows people to cast a very wide net and easily find online friends that share niche interests or are otherwise much more compatible with them than anyone they may ever encounter in their daily life, leading them to prefer hanging out with those online friends. i also have a developmental theory: many young people feel most comfortable socializing online because that’s what they learned growing up… kids appear to have a fundamental need for unsupervised unstructured play but aren’t allowed outside enough for it anymore, so instead that play has shifted online to sandboxy games like roblox or minecraft and that’s where they get socialized. i’ve met some of this emerging population of true “digital natives” before and the social skills they’ve learned online do not always cleanly transfer offline… i once met this guy i privately dubbed “the memer” (he wouldn’t tell anyone his real name) who seemed to only be capable of communicating by referencing memes… i guess this can work in an online chat where you can post images, but in person it really held up the conversation because he had to laboriously describe every meme i wasn’t familiar with, or pull it up on his phone.
in any case, if there’s still a loneliness crisis despite a preponderance of digital third places, then this might mean that digital third places aren’t as fulfilling as offline ones… my gut feeling is that this is likely true, in my time i’ve encountered quite a few people with no offline friends that are very popular and socially successful online, but they still almost always complain about feeling lonely…