Gaming has become our new meeting place

We still sometimes picture the gamer alone at a screen, cut off from the world. Yet for millions of people, launching an online session is mostly about meeting up with friends, exactly like arranging to see them at a café. Video games have become a genuine social space, where the goal isn't always to win but simply to be together. We decode this quiet but profound shift.

The third place, controller edition

Sociologists talk about the third place to describe those spaces, neither home nor work, where we gather for the pleasure of company. The café, the sports club, the village square long played that role. Today, many of these gatherings happen in virtual worlds, headset on. People chat about everything and nothing, laugh, catch up, with the game often serving as a pretext more than a goal.

A bridge across borders

In a region where so many people live to the rhythm of cross-border commutes, online gaming offers precious continuity. A group of friends scattered on either side of the borders can meet up in the evening without anyone getting in a car. The game erases distance and rebuilds common ground, where schedules and kilometres often complicate meeting in person. It's conviviality of a new kind, but conviviality that's very real.

Reducing video games to mere solitary leisure means missing what they've become for an entire generation: a space for connection as much as entertainment. Like any meeting place, it has its codes, its unspoken rules and its balance to find between shared time and time for yourself. But the essential is there: behind the pixels, it's people talking to each other, and maybe that's the real game.