GameChat is Zoom by Nintendo

One of the most illuminating discussions I’ve had about gaming started because I was being an ass.

About ten years ago, an old colleague started to spend a lot of time playing Destiny. An online shooter, Destiny leans more into cooperative play than competitive, giving players a shared world to explore and missions to take on together. I played it, and I liked it decently enough, but only enough to play through each mission once. My colleague, meanwhile, was playing through the same missions dozens of times with his friends.

I didn’t understand it. I could have asked him about it and engaged in an actual conversation. But, of course, I teased him instead.

Being the more mature of the pair, he batted away my silly banter and explained it. And his answer made me think about multiplayer gaming in a whole new way.

He moved to Hong Kong, a world away from his friends in the UK. The distance, combined with kids, jobs and all sorts of other adult things, meant he didn’t get to hang out with his friends like they used to. So, every Friday night, they started hanging out in Destiny.

Multiplayer gaming is an inherently social pastime, so this wasn’t particularly surprising. What struck me about his story, though, was how they flipped things around. Normally, you’re there to play the game, to compete, to win; the chat is just a bit of accompanying banter on top of the main experience of the game itself. For my friend, the chat came first, with the game just a thing in the background. And Destiny was the perfect game for it: since they’ve played the same missions dozens of times, it doesn’t demand as much of their attention, leaving more time for chatter.

His Friday night sessions were, he said, his equivalent of meeting up with his old friends at the pub. Destiny was there, a thing everyone's got their eye on while swapping stories, like a football game playing on a TV in the corner of the bar. Occasionally they demand attention; a goal is scored on TV or a boss appears in Destiny, a shared experience that drives more chatter, more banter, more hot takes. He said it felt identical to their old dynamic at their local pub. They just happened to be shooting aliens while shooting the shit.

What made that so fascinating is that this is how the generations after mine play games online. My old colleague's experiences stayed on my mind as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox grew in prominence, since these weren’t necessarily competitive spaces but social ones too; as much games to play as a place to hang out and chat while doing something else. And it was on my mind again last week while testing out GameChat, the new social feature on Nintendo Switch 2.

GameChat was derided as Nintendo’s take on Zoom when it was first announced, and it’s an apt comparison. It’s a system-level voice chat that allows you to set up chat rooms to talk to your friends, either in the same game or across different games. When you activate it, your game shifts from full-screen into a smaller window, and a few small Zoom-like boxes appear on the bottom, one for each person in the chat. They can even share their screens so you can see a live feed of their games.

Again, as with Destiny, GameChat might not sound like it’s doing anything novel. The PlayStation 4 had voice chat rooms that worked even when you were playing a different game to your friends. Twitch and other services popularized sharing live feeds of gameplay. And, of course, we’re all far too familiar with Zoom.

But the Zoom comparisons are intentional. We all know how to use Zoom — even my 5-year-old remembers the odd days when he had kindergarten classes on Zoom. It is deliberately taking something we’re already familiar with and bringing that model to a new context.

It works really well here, and one of the big reasons is that row of Zoom-like boxes. Being able to watch a live feed of the games your friends are playing adds an extra layer of feeling like you’re all together. You actually get to see why they’re screaming in joy or frustration, to join in helping them solve a puzzle or laughing when they get Mario Kart-ed.

(And, speaking as an Old who grew up before online gaming, something about those boxes feels a lot like the days of huddling in front of the same TV playing split-screen multiplayer. Watching my friends out of the corner of my eye tickles the dusty part of my brain that remembers playing GoldenEye 007 and trying to watch all four players at once.)

I’ve already had great times with old friends on GameChat, friends that I’ve played games with since we were children. We play multiplayer games together occasionally, but only occasionally; aside from the difficulty of aligning schedules, sometimes you don’t want to play a multiplayer game. GameChat allows us to share the time that we’re spending playing different games — to make progress in those massive single-player adventures we so rarely have time to play while still being able to talk, catch up and socialize.

These are still (very) early days for GameChat. I’m sure that novelty is playing a part in how much I’ve used it so far, and I may use it less in the months and years ahead. But every time I do use it, it’s hard not to think of that old colleague’s time with Destiny. Whether it was meeting up in the pub or hanging out in the mall, those experiences have shifted online.

Games are our social spaces now. And GameChat feels like the right tool for that.