Multiplayer Games Will Make People More Connected, Especially in the Age of AI

Over the next decade, games you play with friends will do a lot of the work that dinner parties used to do, and the spread of AI will make that more true every year. That sounds like something the founder of a multiplayer games company would say, and I am one, so I will start from numbers that have nothing to do with games.

In 1975, 42% of Americans had friends or family over at least once a month. This year it is 12%. Derek Thompson put those two numbers next to each other in You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner, and the rest of the essay is him trying to work out where the other thirty points went.

His answer is mostly about cost. Hosting is work: you line up schedules, cook around allergies, clean before and after, find someone to watch the kids, and accept the risk that the evening is a dud. When both adults in a house already have jobs, nobody wants the third one of unpaid party planner. Then there is the line the essay turns on: "Compared to TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology."

I think he is right, and I think the sentence about leisure technology is the useful one, because it reframes the problem as something you can engineer.

Two costs, both rising

Hosting has two prices. There is the labor, which is the cooking and the cleaning. And there is the coordination, which is getting four busy people to agree on a Thursday.

Thompson has a footnote on the second one that I keep thinking about. If each person gets a little busier, the chance that any given night works for everyone drops much faster than the busyness rose, because you are multiplying probabilities. A small change in how packed everyone's week is produces a large change in how often a group of friends ever ends up in the same room. That is how you get a seventy percent drop in hosting without anyone deciding to stop seeing their friends.

Meanwhile the alternative to hosting got cheaper every decade. TV, then cable, then streaming, then a phone that knows exactly what you want to watch next. Thompson's phrase is that these machines "have made other people less necessary to our leisure." Americans spent almost two more hours a day at home in 2022 than in 2003. One option got more expensive and the other got nearly free.

AI makes the cheap option cheaper

Everything a screen does alone, AI is about to do better. The feed already predicts what you want. The next version will make it on demand: the show that is exactly your taste, the game tuned to your skill, a conversation partner who is never busy on Thursday and never has a dietary restriction.

I use these tools all day. Notice which side of the ledger they land on, though. Every one of those improvements lowers the cost of the solitary evening, and none of them lowers the cost of the evening with other people. The gap Thompson measured is going to widen on its own unless somebody works on the other side.

Robert Putnam wrote in 2000, in Bowling Alone, that visiting friends "might entirely disappear" within a generation. Thompson's point is that a generation has passed and the prediction needs updating, since it did not quite disappear. I would add that nobody in 2000 was building a machine to finish the job.

A test for screens

Almost everything is on a screen now, so that cannot be the test. The test is whether the thing is worth anything when you are alone with it.

A feed is worth more alone. So is a prestige show, which Thompson points out people now watch while answering email. A game you play against a bot is worth about the same alone as with company.

Then there is the category I wrote about in the friendslop post: games that are literally nothing without your friends. There is no lobby of strangers and no single-player mode worth the name. If the people you brought are boring, the game is boring. Those games are on a screen, and they pass the test, because they only work as an excuse to get specific people together at a specific time. They are the card table, in other words, and Thompson notes that playing cards fell along with everything else since 1995, and I think that loss is underrated. Cards gave you a reason to invite people over without cooking for them.

Making the social option the cheap one

Treat the two costs as a design problem and ask how low each can go. Labor first. A game night at home still has some: snacks, a cleared table, somebody who owns the game. A game night on a call has nearly none, since nobody cooks or cleans and nobody has to be in the same city.

Coordination is the harder one, and it is where most game nights die. The friendslop post describes the ritual: twenty minutes of "has everyone installed it", "mine is updating", "my laptop can't run it", and one person on a phone who can't join at all. Four people cleared the same hour, and the technology spent a quarter of it on setup. Some of them will not clear the hour again.

The cheapest possible version is a link. Somebody pastes it into the group chat, everyone taps it on whatever device they are already holding, and the game starts, with no account to make, nothing to install and no argument about which store. If joining takes the same effort as opening a video, then the evening with other people finally costs about the same as the evening without them, and Thompson's terrible leisure technology is suddenly competitive.

That is the bar we hold ourselves to at antics. Every game is a link that opens in the browser, on a phone or a laptop, and the people on the other end of the call are in the room within the time it takes to say "okay, I'm in." We built it that way because we were tired of losing the first twenty minutes, long before anyone sent me a sociology essay.

Not a guilt problem

Thompson ends by refusing to blame anyone. Most people, asked in the abstract, say they want the dinner party and the neighborhood friends. On the actual Wednesday, the screen wins, and it wins because it is easier, not because anyone stopped caring. He calls it a coordination failure, and a coordination failure gets fixed when the thing everyone claims to want becomes the thing that is easiest to do.

Hosting used to be cheap because the house was already full and the alternatives were worse. Neither of those is coming back. What can come back is a version of hosting that costs a link and an hour, and that is why I expect multiplayer games, of all things, to carry more of our friendships as AI makes every solitary evening easier. Want a good laugh with a group of friends you have not played with in a while? Invite them over and put one of the antics games on the TV, or just drop a couple of the links in the group chat.