Bingo has changed a lot over the last decade. We’ve moved from a large amount of working class society going to bingo halls on weekends to a huge decline in bingo halls still in operation, but conversely, massive increases in people playing bingo online, not just working class women, but all classes and nationalities.
While that’s been good for getting lots more people involved in playing bingo, it could be argues that the shift to online gaming has made it a more anti-social than before. Cut to images of bingo addicts never leaving their house, constantly trying for that full house. Is this a genuine concern and what are bingo organisations doing to build back the community that we lost when bingo halls went into decline?
Just how social is online bingo?
There’s undeniably some evident decline in how social bingo is. Spending time in the same room as someone is never going to be quite the same as chatting online, but saying that, there is still that ability to chat using a text-based messaging service. Chat systems are used by almost all of the online bingo sites, so they do offer some way to communicate, but that doesn’t seem enough on its own.
Which bingo site is the most social?
Now that chat has been standardised across online bingo sites, it leaves room for some companies to put in extra effort so people can interact better than ever before. www.bingocams.com is a good example of these brands: they give players the opportunity to attach their webcams to the chat feature, so everyone who chooses to do so can see and speak to each other without having to use their keyboards. This is way more social than the plain, boring chat boxes and even the bingo caller is attached by webcam, so you know that the game is being handled by an actual person rather than a computer.
Can brand go further to make online gaming more social?
Of course they can. Technology is moving so fast that we will have new tech and gimmicks to make it better all the time, the trouble is that, as most of these future techs are either in development or don’t exist yet, we don’t necessarily know what they’re going to be. Certain promising things are the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality headset which could be programmed to simulate a bingo hall for all the players to sit in.