SXSWORLD

2 6 SXS W O R L D | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0 | SXSW.COM The scale of multiplayer video games has grown over the years, upping the player count from split- screen in Goldeneye to MMORPG experiences in World of Warcraft and battle royales in Fortnite. Today's gamers, particularly younger ones, are part of huge online networks of friends, collab- orators and friendly competitors. As traditional social media use stagnates among their age group, collaborative and socially-oriented video games are taking the place of more traditional platforms. Consider the numbers. Despite signing up approximately seven out of ten Americans as users, Facebook captures only about 50 percent of U.S. teens, according to 2018 data from the Pew Research Center. Only 32 percent were on Twitter. Rather than trading in the personal divul- gences and political arguments of those two platforms, younger users seem to prefer sharing content such as photos, videos, and memes. The same Pew survey found that 85 percent of teens were active on YouTube, and 72 percent were active Instagram users. Newcomer TikTok, the endlessly iterative video sharing platform, boasts nearly 16 million users aged 16–24 in the United States, according to figures released by the company. Video games are even more popular than any of these social media plat- forms. According to its publisher, Epic Games, Fortnite attracts about 250 million players world- wide, while Microsoft reported 112 million users per month for its cooperative building game, Minecraft. Another cross-platform world builder, Roblox, has about 100 million users. For fans of these games, who are mostly under 20 years old, community is the biggest appeal, and the games' designers are betting that this interest in sharing experiences is the future of online interaction. "Roblox is really the new form of social," said Tami Bhaumik, the vice president of marketing and digital civility for Roblox Corporation. "It's 3D immersion where people are able to play and experience things together, to work together as a team to accomplish a goal, and sometimes just to hang out with their friends online and chat." Building, Not Following Creative Video Games as the New Social Media By Robbie Preliasco Meep City Meep City by Roblox by Roblox

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