Third places and virtual spaces

The traditional definition of a “third place” is a place that’s not your home or work. It’s not the place you live in and it’s not the place you make a living in. It’s a place to engage and interact with members of your community or tribe in a public setting. Think parks, playgrounds, or urban centers. The key differentiator of a third place from just another common gathering space is that you need a sense of familiarity with the regular attendees in order to build a strong sense of community over time. Parks and urban centers have been desperately trying to masquerade as the de-facto third spaces of cities for decades now, but in the past couple of decades, virtual communities in online forums and multiplayer games have been far more successful at this than any other form of it in history ever was.

The concept of third places has been around forever. The Greco-Romans kept the traditional early civilization lifestyle of public bathhouses alive, and this was where you would interact with the locals every day during the bathing hours. The same people, the same time, at the same place. It was the first “office water cooler” of many civilizations, and it contributed greatly to its citizens forming strong communal bonds through this ritual of needing to go to a bathhouse every day. Bathing became ritualized to the point of an art form through this. This third place disappeared entirely in Western culture with the invention of private baths and showers, but is still preserved in some cultures. Saunas, for example, are still a prevalent staple in every house that’s constructed in Finland.

For much of the Arabic world, the presence of a hookah (or shisha) at gatherings is extremely commonplace. On a regular Friday evening, you’ll see riverbanks lined with hookah pipes and hundreds of young people gathered by the water slowly smoking the hookah for hours at a time. These folks would be regulars, frequenting the same spots and hanging out with the same group of people every time. This is a spontaneous third place that was formed in any public space in much of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. It was popularized by emperors and shahs of the Persian and Mughal Empires, spreading the culture to much of the population long after they were gone. Today, hookah bars are all over North America and Europe as a place of leisurely pastime, even if they’re far less popular than they were a few centuries ago.

In most of Eastern Asia (especially Taiwan and Vietnam), night markets are the place to go. There’s nothing more appetizing than the scintillating aromas of deep-fried street food after a long day at the office. Every night, thousands of salarymen and youngsters line up in droves outside Asia’s night markets, either to buy fresh ingredients to take home and cook dinner with their families, or to hang out in the city sampling the delicacies on offer late into the night while exchanging candid stories about their day. Again, you’d have your regulars and these regulars would have their favorite food stalls or hangout spots. These are the most temporary of third places, as they can only exist at a specific time of day and can only be taken advantage of in that timeframe as everyone’s schedules aligns with it. It works especially well because the people stopping by at this third place are usually on their way from their workplace to their homes (from their second place to their first place).

Around the world, cultures and civilizations have very different definitions of third places. Video game arcades, jazz bars, skate parks, the beach, shopping malls, and cyber cafés are all examples of third places that have come and gone over time. Some have still stuck around, and others have disappeared entirely as the world has evolved. But with the advent of the internet, communicating with others and finding online communities has become incredibly easy, and it’s drastically re-inventing the way third places work in the physical world.

It’s never been possible before to find a community of people who are really into writing cross-media fan fiction between say, Harry Potter and Transformers. And there’s probably a very active forum somewhere with a few hundred extremely passionate members. For these people, this forum is the third place where they log in to every day after school and work, reviewing each others’ writing and putting up their own stories for review. The forums have sub-forums for other aspects of life, like general discussion topics, life or career advice, and random talks.

For me, forums like Gametalk and Marrilland Forums were a huge part of my early teens. I was really into competitive Pokémon battling, and I found a very welcoming community of people who were just as into it (some way more) than I was and we got along incredibly well. It’s again important to stress here that it was the same sixty or so people logging into the forums every day and posting things. This is how you build a sense of familiarity and trust in a third place over time. There were general discussion threads where people would pop in and talk about literally anything. It provided the same communal bonds that bathhouses, hookah lounges, and the night markets offered, but this time in a virtual space.

With the internet, third places were suddenly not constrained to a physical location. It didn’t matter where you were from, what you looked like, what your gender was, what you were studying, or what you did for work. All the biases and assumptions we’d normally have about someone based on physical appearance and all the snap judgements we’d make about them based on their demeanor and mannerisms during face-to-face interactions were suddenly no longer a factor. They were completely thrown out the window by the anonymity that the internet provided. All you needed was to know how to read and write the same language relatively well and have a pursued interest with the community about the thing that you were all passionate about.

As someone who moved around a lot growing up, having this permanent virtual third space where I could log in and message the same group of people had a huge impact on my connection to humanity in the world. It didn’t matter how often my family moved or how far away we went. The same people were always there as long as I had an internet connection. AIM, AOL Chat, Yahoo Messenger, and many other live chat applications quickly capitalized on the value of this third place and created behemoths of industry that are still alive and kicking today. It spawned an entire generation of millenials who grew up with the early internet as their third place of choice during their formative years.

Things get crazier in the new millenium with video games gaining online functionalities like voice chat. Competitive online multiplayer games like Counterstrike had Russian players communicating with German players to co-ordinate play strategies and calling out enemy locations, forcing them to learn each others’ languages (or at the very least, a universal way of in-game communication to accomplish the same objective). At the same time, you had groups of middle-schoolers running home from school and logging into Xbox Live to play Halo with their classmates. Again, these were regular activities that over time created thousands of virtual temporal third spaces across many, many games.

I myself was very into one of these. I spent a good chunk of 2008-2012 being extremely addicted to a neat little video game from Valve called Team Fortress 2. I had a list of favorite servers to play on, and every day after school, I’d log in to these serves to play the game. Over time, I started to recognize usernames and noticed that it was the same group of maybe forty or fifty people constantly logging in around the same time to play the game for a few hours every night. We got chatting on voice chat and eventually got to know each other very well. We’d co-ordinate server wide activities and create our own funky game modes or have dance parties at the middle of the control point. It was all spontaneous, fun, and a really chill time.

It’s important to note that we weren’t actually paying much attention to the game. We had all been playing TF2 for hundreds of hours by the time we found each other on the server. We knew all the characters, all the weapons, all the gamemodes, all the maps, and all the strategies really well. When we’d play together, the game just sort of faded out into the background and the attention was instead on our interactions with each other. It didn’t matter if we died in the game, it didn’t matter who won the match, and it didn’t matter what the objective was. The game was simply a space to exist and play in while we all connected with each other.

We got very close over time. We knew each others’ birthdays, interests, hobbies, what we did for work, what we were studying, our dreams and passions about life, and so much more. There were deeply personal confessions that had us all rallying around each other for emotional support and hilarious stories about someone’s prank on their co-workers that had the entire server of 64 people in laughing fits for hours at times. And all this was happening while we were playing as cartoonish 60s-era mercenaries tearing the living daylights out of each other in a granary fort involving explosions, fire, rockets, magical healing beams, masked French spies, and charging Scottish knights. Yeah, it was a good time.

Today, when I see the popularity of games like Fortnite explode, I see it as the TF2 for this generation. The battle royale genre gets a lot of flack from veteran gamers, and Fortnite is a game for which it’s very easy to jump on the hate bandwagon. But when I watch streams of people playing Fortnite, I don’t see gameplay strategies or people desperately trying to survive the eye of the storm. I see lots of friends making idle chatter with one another about their day at school, making plans to hang out later, talking about movies or music, and sharing solutions to their homework. And that’s just heartwarming because they’ve found their version of a third space to have these conversations in. It gives me flashbacks of 2009 when I had a similar community in the forums I frequented and the endless games of TF2 late into the night. It’s incredibly important to have third places like this for your mental sanity, even if it’s entirely virtual. The people are still real.

As AR and VR become more mainstream, we’re going to see more and more third spaces exist solely in the virtual world. It’s fair to assume that this means we’ll see fewer physical world third spaces, but we won’t know for sure. Maybe the over-proliferation of virtual third spaces will necessitate a nostalgia for the physical third spaces of yore and maybe we’ll see parks and bathhouses make a comeback (but let’s be real, we’ll probably have a VR bathhouse experience that simulates a public bathhouse while you take a bath in the privacy of your own shower, given the way things are trending). But third places geared around food, like the Asian night markets, might be safe for now (unless Soylent really takes off).

The fact that these virtual third spaces can be accessed from anywhere really makes it very appealing to form and maintain lasting communities over time. There’s no risk of the tribe fragmenting due to proximity constraints or losing touch over time. The worst that can happen is you grow old, have lesser time for it, and slowly drop the habit. This is indeed what happened to my virtual third spaces, and I dearly miss them sometimes. The anticipation of coming home and knowing that there was a group of like-minded peers ready to engage in conversation on just about anything was just too nice of a comfort that many don’t have the privilege of experiencing even today. The fact that I could boot up TF2 and know that I could play around with my favorite character while making friendly banter about the political shenanigans in the world with my teammates from far-off lands was just a beautiful ritual that kept me sane during the tougher times.

Despite all the negativity and toxicity that online communities are infamous for, these virtual spaces (if you can find them) are beacons of light in a rapidly globalizing world going slightly more and more insane with information overload every day. It’s important to connect with a regular base of people in a space that you can trust and feel safe in. I truly hope that the best parts of my experiences with virtual third spaces will carry on to the next generations, because even though I’ve never met any of those people I shared the experiences with in real life, the memories I’ve got are fantastic and will cherish them forever, even if there is no physical remnant or artifact of them that exists in the world right now 🙂