The Harsh Truth About Video Game Friendships

How your friendships may be more surface level than you realize...

As I’ve grown older, my relationship with video games has changed. Years of Modern Warfare 2 quickscoping, Halo 3 jenga, and Minecraft PVP have taught me a lot about friendship, fun, and how to trash talk scrubs who can’t twiddle their fucking thumbs while I’m backpacking an entire lob…

…I digress.

I’ve made friends through video games, some more sticky than others. When thinking about the friendships that have lingered in my life, there’s always a balance between talking about things and talking about each other. The more I’ve talked with someone about them, the deeper the connection grows.

I no longer speak to a lot of the people I spent time with online. This got me thinking, how did video games play a factor in these friendships splitting? Some of these friends felt visceral, yet they’re gone now.

For starters, video games make conversation easy. In most team games, we make callouts to where enemies are, which enemies are dead, or any other valuable information. Extended across an entire play session, entire conversations can have dialogue ONLY pertaining to the game, not the other people.

An entire gaming session can be played with people you know nothing about. Continue to play with these people, and you might consider them friends. You invest time, attention, and have fun with these people. But are you really friends?

This idea can also be seen in the workplace. You go into the office and talk about surface level things, though often you get to the end of the day talking ONLY about the work. We don’t call these people friends, we call them co-workers. Why? You’re not talking TO them, you’re talking WITH them about something ELSE. In order for humans to get close, we must not only converse while standing shoulder to shoulder (working together), but ALSO converse face-to-face (Human-to-human).

As a gamer, I’ve certainly come across these friendships before. You get done playing a game and there’s nothing more to be said. The job is done, time to clock out. Crickets in the discord. Conversation feels awkward when you’re not playing the game, so we leave the discord and boot up some YouTube to fill the silence.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These conditional friendships are harmless, though we need to be wary of what fraction these friendships make up in our pie. We need to be cautious about these taking up the MAJORITY of our friendships, because if they do, the lack of close relationships will contribute to a negative well-being and potential feelings of loneliness.

With male and female loneliness on the rise, many turn to video games as a way to socialize, not realizing that the socializing they are doing in video games is far different than the socializing required when there is no game present. Video games make conversation easy by giving two people something to talk about.

We see these pseudo-friendships everywhere. Between sports, video games, hobbies, etc., many people find connection through common interest and leave it there, never taking it further. A quick way to test which friendships are pseudo or not is to ask these questions: If I took away the thing we had in common, would we still speak? Would we make the effort to find new interests? Do we even need common interests to remain friends?

I say all of this because having close connections matter. There are a lot of people struggling right now to meet people and make close connections, and they might be confused as to why they feel lonely amongst other people. This might be a factor as to why.

If you want to feel close to someone, it’s not a matter of spending time or having a common interest—it’s about speaking to people with the intent of knowing their story. Learning their likes and dislikes. Learning how they approach the world. Learning who they truly are.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking connection is anything other than vulnerability.

You’ll be left alone if you do.

Til next time,

sapoots

(┐「ε:)🤍🌱