Memoirs of a Gamer: Long lost friends and silent acquaintances

You, yes you! Look at your steam friends list, if you have steam that is, now tell me; how many people on your list do you never play with, or even talk to? How many are given no more notice than a glance at the corner of the screen as their name pops up. They are online now, but they may as well be offline for all the attention you will give them!

Strategically placed chat boxes...

I recently finished a game of Neptune’s pride, not the one I have written a series about but another I played in parallel. It was a great game with a tense finish and engaging players who fought until the bitter end. During the game I added another player on my steam friend’s list and we started plotting our ultimate betrayal. Now, I am hugely over sentimental and when the game ended I felt s twinge of sadness that it was absent. The game was very enjoyable and the other players interesting and engaging to talk to. Yet it did make me think about the nature of gaming friends and how oddly fickle those gaming flash friendships can be.

When a budding friendship is rooted in a game and when that game ends, or you stop playing the rest withers away. There have been many friends I have made who have disappeared into obscurity with no way for me to find them again. It is not like searching out a long lost friend from school, unless you know their real name once they are gone it is often just a stroke of luck that will cause you to bump into each other once again.

I’ve lost a couple of close gaming friends this way, both of us having drifted apart as games came and went. The first was a friend from Subspace, the online game I played a lot as a teenager, which I have written about before. Every single night we would play against each other and talk for hours about anything and everything. Then when I moved on from subspace, we stopped talking. I genuinely feel sad about how quickly our tight friends fizzled away and I often wonder what he is doing with his life. One of our squad (clan) mates, had terminal cancer, I never found out what happen to him. I guess he died, probably years ago, but ill never know for sure. Gaming friendships, for me, are a series of unanswered questions.

Then there was a girl I met gaming, when I was fifteen, and we spoke for over a year, often way into the very early morning, with the sun raising and birds singing behind the curtains. It was as close to a real relationship you can have with someone you have never seen in real life at the age of fifteen. There were even what I now realise to be fairly questionable photos zipping between our inboxes. Yet when the game we shared eventually died, it all stopped. And again I have no idea what happened to her… (I really hope it was a her!).

So while I have made some amazing and lasting friendships through games, I have lost a lot as well, and there is something truly sad about that.