Playing video games is my absolute favorite thing to do. I legitimately don't have any other hobbies, all I do during my down time away from work is play video games. I used to only play single player games with no interaction with other people. I enjoyed that for many years, and still do, but sometimes you crave talking with other people who are playing the same game as you. If you are playing a social game, you can be pretty damn sure there will always be something to talk about with the other players in the game. Typically you and the other players will just talk about the actual game but as you continue to talk with those same people for months after months after months, you start to really talk about your lives and other interests. That's when you know you've made a true friend. Best part about that process is when you make a great friend without ever actually meeting them. Isn't that just amazing? Even more amazing than that is when you finally get to meet these friends in real life, and they are exactly the same as when you are talking in the game. I'll give you all an example of this happening to me. This past year, September 2015 to be exact, I bought myself a PS4 with all of the game Destiny bundled in. The whole deal, base game plus all the expansions including The Taken King. I have a friend that I meet in high school and kept in touch with after we graduated who I knew had the game, so naturally we started playing together. We got through the main story together, did way more Strikes than I care to count, and finally got good enough gear to run the raid, King's Fall. We ran it a few time in PUGs, but really hated having to find new people every time. Eventually we got good enough at the raid, that we started teaching other people how to run it. The first group I helped through were my first real friends that I had meet strictly through a game. They are a great group of people, but as with all games, eventually a few of them stopped playing. Luckily for the ones that remained we found some more people to raid with. Interestingly enough, they were real life friends with the two people that stopped playing. We ran that raid so many fucking times, I don't even want to look at my player card to see the actual count. After we got good enough at the Normal Mode difficulty, we bumped it up to Hard Mode to get better loot. Sure, it was more stressful for all of us, but we were all friends at that point so no one got too shitty. Fast forward a few months and I'm planning my yearly family vacation out to Virginia to see some extended family. Guess who else lives out in VA? That's right, some of my raid group. Never meet them before in the 9 months I've talked with them, but they drove two hours to my extended family's place just so we could have a couple beers together and talk in person for a few hours. How cool is that? Best part about it all, it felt like I was meeting up with old friends that I hadn't seen in awhile. There was no awkwardness when talking, it was just like when we talked through our headsets almost 600 miles away. That one experience pretty much sums up why I love social video games over almost anything else. I hope that with this blog I can encourage my readers to reach out and make new friends through the immense fun that is playing video games.
Keep laughing and playing games,
Ian
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