I sometimes think about. What kind of online game that you play with strangers can possibly be fun

Because a lot of online games, especially competitive ones, seem designed to bring out just the worst in people

If, as soon as the match ends, you never see that person again... why should you care? What incentive is there to care about THEIR fun?

Ideally one would just care about others by default and without incentives, but that's not really how most people who play online games work

I'm thinking about Overwatch specifically. It took me a while to figure out I wasn't having fun with it, and by the time I did I was just so burnt out. Every match was the same. Nobody cared about their teammates. Everyone was out to play what THEY wanted. It was exhausting

@socks ideally the incentive should be to work together because that's how you have fun. I don't know if that's fixable in Overwatch though, it works in say, Splatoon (plus matches there are so short that if you get steamrolled it doesn't matter that much, you just queue again)

@noiob Splatoon is certainly better! But I still find myself really wanting to win and just, having a bad time if there's a very large skill gap. Maybe part of the problem is just my own mental state though, that should be fixable

@socks I mean, a competitive game can't fix that sometimes the other team is better, on the contrary, they're trying to get you to a point where you win about half your games. They can make it suck less, which Sploon 3 is trying to do, for example you don't have to look at your team being sad on the results screen anymore