Some time ago, during the 2024 Call of Duty release cycle, someone I’ve never heard of posted this response to a clip from the new Call of Duty featuring someone else I’ve never heard of.
This isn’t the first kind of post like this I’ve seen and I’m certain you could dig up any number of similar ones, but all of them have something in common: misplaced aggression.
There are two distinct groups who play video games: casuals and competitors. The former is looking to experience the uniqueness of a multiplayer game and have a good time, while the latter is interested in the sporting nature of games where you can hone your skills and pull off sick nasty gameplay.
These two groups tend to have grey areas where others might say there’s a “third” or “extra & unique” category, where some casual players like working on skills and some competitive players just want to spend time goofing off with the rest of the playerbase. This is a very real phenomenon and people will label themselves as such to distinguish themselves from the crowd, but these are the two undeniable distinct sides of any multiplayer game’s playerbase.
When you put a casual in a multiplayer setting, their number one goal is “fun” which typically means they want to get wins (kills, points, dominations, KOs, combos; it’s all contextual to the game), feel good about their perceived ability, and leverage the game mechanics for that initial dopamine hit. Casuals also enjoy being what I would describe as “active spectators” where they’ll play a supporting role and enjoy the spectacle of gameplay while simultaneously not feeling like dead weight.
On the other hand, competitors tend to have prior experience with the genre that any given game is a part of. They enjoy the mechanics of the game, the reward from honing their skill, the respect from their peers, and the drive to keep playing and improving. They’re usually the players who, in games such as CounterStrike, will hop in a third-party VOIP program (i.e., Mumble, TeamSpeak, Discord) and start talking about what plays they’re going to make with their teammates/friends.
None of the experiences described above are “bad”, by the way. It’s important to enable both groups in a successful multiplayer game. Casual elements in a multiplayer game are critical because the overarching point of a game is to have fun, and in the process of having fun you create shared experiences with others which can turn into – you guessed it – friendships. Competitive elements lead to the same outcome for competitive-minded players, so it’s equally important to provide the resources for a competitive scene to take root.
What unifies these experiences together is that these shared experiences in predictable areas at scale build community. These communities end up serving as places where people can log on after a hard day in the outside world and just have a good time with their friends and fellow enthusiasts. They become places where people can bond over mutual interests and put voices and personalities to names and avatars.
For most multiplayer games these communities are built upon game servers. Players will find ones that fit their objectives and tastes, have fun, send friend requests to others, become regulars in these servers, create new places around the game (IRC, Discord, Steam Group Chat, Mumble/TeamSpeak, etc.) and help foster a game’s sense of community. It’s organic, feeds into a game’s ability to stay popular for years on end, creates strong bonds between players, and gives people homes away from home.
These kinds of places in and around the game are defined as third places by social scientist Ray Oldenburg. In his research, Oldenburg defines three specific places that people occupy in their day-to-day lives: the workplace, the home, and an entirely separate location where an individual can show up to and socialize in without the burdens of work or home. Joel Spolsky has a nice summary of Oldenburg’s research as well as his own commentary from the perspective of software development.
As a personal anecdote, I spent a massive chunk of my life playing Team Fortress 2 both casually and competitively, roughly a decade. While time moves on and so do people, I made a lot of friends during my time playing and I wouldn’t have the career I do without them. I went to meetups, spent long nights joking around in Mumble servers, goofed around in 24/7 Badwater, Dustbowl, and 2fort servers, played in pay-to-play and free-to-play leagues (ESEA, CEVO, TWL, UGC), and documented a few fun moments across it all. None of this would have been possible without the third places provided by and spawned around the game: FightingAmphibians, Gotfrag/tf.tv, tight-knit Steam Group chats, minuscule Mumble servers, the whole lot.
Based on that experience, I make the claim that social media posts like the aforementioned are misplaced aggression due to the homogenization of multiplayer gameplay and elimination of gaming third spaces. My argument is that as multiplayer games have become hyper focused on mass-market appeal, small scale cooperative play, and small scale competitive multiplayer, they’ve lost their special attribute of being a “third place”.
In modern multiplayer games, casual and competitive players are tossed together in one meatgrinder in small groups; this evil meatgrinder has many titles but the true name of the beast is “matchmaking”. Players are unceremoniously and arbitrarily dropped into a game, forced to rapidly adapt to each other in a competitive environment, play on a random map that might suck ass for different reasons for both groups, and likely never see anyone they play with or against again. They are forced to play this way forever and if any alternative ways of playing are present, they tend to have their own restrictions.
There’s only one way to play and that way was tailor-made to be competitive, but only competitive within the sphere of the game itself, where the only recognition is a few ranked points for decimating a rag-tag group. There’s no open playground for people to make mini-games for themselves, little to no room in-game for idle chit-chat between players, and rank divisions put external stress on both sides: a casual player has to meet the baseline seriousness and dedication of a competitive player, and a competitive player has to ensure their own gameplay is up to snuff to both fight their peers and support the less-experienced casual player. The multiplayer “third place” has been completely removed from the equation and the main way of playing is more akin to a job or exercise than a fun activity.
Compare this distillation of gameplay to the habits that tend to crop up for old-school multiplayer games where certain maps will emerge as “community favorites”, where these maps enable players to participate in wacky group hijinks or come up with their own little mini-games within the game. I made a tweet back in 2022 talking about how certain maps enabled players to passively create little microcosms of gameplay.
With large enough team sizes and per-server player counts, players are likely to find places on the map where they’re able to enact some strategy or minigame that they’ve come up with, and occasionally find kindred spirits. A trio may set up shop in 2fort sewers, five stalwart clone troopers may dig in by the ruined tower on Rhen Var Citadel, ten angry men might decide to set up camp on the opponent’s Titan in Battlefield 2142; regardless, there will be some gathering of similar-minded combatants. They spend time playing and communicating, and this chatting can even shift to topics unrelated to the game at hand. As mentioned earlier, this is where the seeds of community are planted and also where they grow.
If you watch the actual clip in the original post, the player “Sax” and his friends are doing a bang-up job. His positioning and rotations are on point and his friends are putting out good comms. Even if you’re like me and haven’t played Call of Duty for years, it’s clear there’s a lot of skill being demonstrated and cooperation between the group that should be lauded as admirable. They are very clearly in the “competitive” group of players based on their performance and approach to the game.
“Tyler”, on the other hand, is very much a casual player. Just a cursory scroll through his posts reveals that he’s all-in on content creation. His approach to gameplay is sheer entertainment value: trying to pull off “epic” plays, stir the pot/talk shit, etc., all for his viewerbase and that’s fine.
Tyler’s response to the clip is really just to drum up engagement for his platforms, but on some level he knows the sentiment is there among not only his viewerbase but among the greater Call of Duty fanbase as a whole. In years past there would be a clear division where casual and competitive players could play the same game and choose to intermingle (e.x., competitive players had MLG GameBattles, casual players could queue matchmaking for Shipment, and both groups could intermingle in Search & Destroy).
With the slow death of competitive avenues such as MLG GameBattles and the unification of both sides of the multiplayer experience, competitive players have lost their third places where they would pursue their idea of fun for a given game while leaving the casual players to their own devices. Topics like Skill-Based Matchmaking are at the forefront of discussion because competitive players are thriving in these modern competitively-themed environments that they’ve been able to adjust to while casuals are either struggling or quitting outright.
The intentions of a casual player aren’t always pure but casual players are the lifeblood and majority of a multiplayer game’s community. If they can’t experience the game’s offerings like their competitive counterparts and feel that they’re actively being denied, they will cry out and eventually stop playing. Competitive players will continue to play in scrims and such but as the developer for any given multiplayer game sees player retention slipping, higher-ups will start to see this as dwindling interest and in turn a dead revenue stream.
As these playercount warning bells start chiming, the developer will either begin sunsetting the game or make sweeping and/or frequent changes to how various mechanics work in the hopes of drawing the eyes of the casual audience once more. Both of these deny the competitive side their fun with the game: the changes may destabilize the competitive meta entirely and/or even worse, be viewed as lunacy or a “blatant attention grab” by even the casual players. All of this because both sides aren’t given proper consideration of their ideas of what it means to have fun with a video game.
I think the changes to the PvP multiplayer landscape in conjunction with other shifts in gaming and society as a whole have fractured the sense of community multiplayer games used to have and the literal ability to form community. In turn, this “matchmaking game loop” creates alienation for casual players and robs competitive players of gameplay that represents a welcome change of pace. This alienation is what causes casual players to lash out like this; they feel that they’ve been denied the promise of a fun video game they can keep coming back to, and that there aren’t any places within the game that they feel like they can call “home”.
I would argue that until game developers return to form with how games like Team Fortress, CounterStrike, Battlefield Bad Company 2, etc., work where the greater playerbase is able to enjoy the spectacle of the game but small-scale modes and servers are provided for competitive players, we’ll continue to see a vicious cycle where a new game comes out, inevitably lands into balance hot water, a long burn of complaints begin on social media, and eventually the only legacy for that game is a pile of viral video clips and images on social media.