Online gaming on PC used to be quite different from today. Dedicated servers - some run officially by the game developers, but many run by player groups - were the way to play online. Games included server browsers, where players can find good servers to play on, based on a myriad of factors such as ping (latency) or game settings. You can save the good servers you find and always go back to it by connecting directly by IP. Today the world is quite different. Although some games continue to offer the classic dedicated server system, the vast majority of the most popular games have switched to using automated matchmaking systems. Matchmaking is simple for the player: you choose some basic settings such as the game mode, and the system automatically finds the fastest server with the right number of random strangers who are at the same skill level as you to play with.

Arguably matchmaking tries to reduce the essence of what a player is trying to do - with all the tweaking in dedicate server browsers - down to a simple “play” button. But reductions like this come with a price, and with matchmaking, we lost a sense of community and discovery. I’ve always felt that there is something charming about the dedicated server system. Each server is like a local cafe where you can go and hangout. Just like an actual cafe, people go for the obvious thing - the coffee/game - but can end up discovering and staying for something else: meeting new people. Because players had explicit view and control of the servers, they can reliably go back to the same server. Players who enjoy playing together often come back to the same server, and friendships can emerge from what began as a group of strangers¹.

Matchmaking, with its simplicity, abstracted all of this away. Players are reduced to a single number, the matchmaking ratio (MMR), and people with similar numbers are matched together without considering much else (other than ping), automatically by the algorithm. Players in a matchmaking system are a fungible commodity, in the most abstract sense of economics. They have no way to provide input into the system other than their in-game performance. In a sense, matchmaking is a way to crowdsource making intelligent in-game bots to play with, because it is so hard to make it with AI today. Sure, there are still friend systems in most online games today, but they are mostly secondary to the matchmaking system, usually only allowing you to play with your friends as teammates. Some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming had been playing with friends on opposing teams, which happened a lot on the repeatedly frequented dedicated servers².

One big topic in online gaming today is in-game toxicity between players. Many factors contributed to the level of toxicity in team-based games, including game design, and I think the move to matchmaking certainly had a role to play. By treating players as a fungible resource, matchmaking somewhat strips the aspects of humanity from the players. On top of that, interactions with players are limited to single games in matchmaking systems (after each round, you go through the algorithm again to be matched with a new set of strangers), further lowering the social cost of being toxic. Just like how it is much easier for people to attack a random handle on Twitter compared to a person in real life, it is trivial to be toxic in an MMR-based game. On the other hand, although toxicity can exist in games with dedicated server systems as well, there are many mechanisms to curtail this. Players often connect to a server and play many rounds, so there is a higher social cost to being toxic (iterated game vs. single shot, in the game theoretic sense); servers often had moderators who would kick toxic players; servers as communities fostered friendships between players, reducing toxicity even further³.

In a way, online gaming, with its shift from dedicated servers to matchmaking, is a microcosm reflecting what has happened in the broader world. As the world became more globally connected, we had to deal with increasingly larger scales. As scaling is an extremely difficult problem (perhaps even the most difficult), we had to take shortcuts, and one of them is reductionism. People today are often reduced to a tiny set of bits (an MMR, a Twitter username), and are made to interact with one another in this massively compressed way. With all the enormous benefits we have reaped from the increased connectedness, we should be cognizant of the costs.

In another sense, the move to matchmaking is perhaps the result of the increased drive for hyper specialization in the modern economy. We increasingly tend to want to do one thing at a time, and do it really well. When I get into a game, very often I just want to quickly “pwn some n00bs” and move on to something else. Our lives have become a series of highly narrow, focused, and efficient set of singular instances of experiences. The demand for ever higher efficiency has made multifarious systems difficult to compete in and survive. But the price we pay is the value in the cross-pollination of the different ranges of experiences that can happen in a single complex interaction model. Sometimes I miss the good old days when I could meet new, interesting people while I’m pwning n00bs.