> Thinking of this makes me realize me how little I’ve experienced communal activities since then. It has the same feeling of a family sitting together making Christmas cookies, or a group of artists sitting together sketching. People complain about the difficulty of making friends in your thirties, and I wonder how much of that is simply because we don’t afford ourselves the time for such communal activities. We aren’t regularly around groups of people with the sort of free time that precipitates these moments of idle bonding.
I've been thinking about this for the past couple of years, especially since the pandemic. I was locked down with my wife and two kids the entire, but we spent less time than you'd expect just being together.
We were either:
1. Doing explicit demarcated activity together like eating dinner, watching a movie, or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat (except for dinner).
2. Doing our own completely mentally-emcompassing things, usually involving separate screens. These also don't lend themselves to idle conversation. We may be spatially colocated, but we are all effectively worlds away.
Ever-present electronic devices connected to the Internet with an infinite feed of new media to consume has essentially destroyed all middle ground between those two poles.
It's horrible and horribly unhealthy. People need time to just idle next to each othere with our minds free to wander and free to peridically bounce off each other.
> or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat
People have shifted to the wrong kinds of games. You want a traditional turn-based game where most of everyone's time is spent waiting for the current player to finish their turn.
We tried some of those and they're OK. But they're still structured. What people really need is unstructured time together where our attention isn't fully consumed by something.
I'd say some co-op games work well if they are paced well - when you circle through levels where you can idly chat, levels where you have to intellectually cooperate (solve puzzles together and such), and something more dynamic (shooters/action levels/fighting bosses) that lets your mind switch back to the game entirely.
Also, tabletop games somehow create more intimate experience, IMO.
I've been thinking about this for the past couple of years, especially since the pandemic. I was locked down with my wife and two kids the entire, but we spent less time than you'd expect just being together.
We were either:
1. Doing explicit demarcated activity together like eating dinner, watching a movie, or playing a multi-player videogame. These are nice, but require coordination and don't provide much opportunity for idle chat (except for dinner).
2. Doing our own completely mentally-emcompassing things, usually involving separate screens. These also don't lend themselves to idle conversation. We may be spatially colocated, but we are all effectively worlds away.
Ever-present electronic devices connected to the Internet with an infinite feed of new media to consume has essentially destroyed all middle ground between those two poles.
It's horrible and horribly unhealthy. People need time to just idle next to each othere with our minds free to wander and free to peridically bounce off each other.