I’ll admit it. I’ve always been a gamer.
When I was younger, I’d watch my brother play his various Playstation 2 games, and sometimes he’d let me try the demos he got from Playstation Magazine. I had my Nintendo DS and my hand-me-down Game Boy Advance from my brother, but the interest eventually tapered out until I discovered that I could play games on my computer. The first one I ever bought – or rather, the first one I begged my parents to get me – was the Orange Box, a collection of three games from Valve, who were essentially the kings of the computer market. From there, I fell in love with having whole new worlds at my fingertips and the passing interest grew into a hobby. I’d come home from school, do my homework (or procrastinate on it), and then hop right onto whatever game I was working on at the moment.
I just didn’t expect the hobby to turn out to be something helpful.
See, here’s the thing, when you’re going through a lot of changes in your life, it’s very important to have something to fall back on, something nice and familiar. And I’ve gone through quite a few changes. In 2019, thus far, I have: changed majors (farewell Creative Writing!), transferred schools (hello UNH!), interned for a political campaign, went through two major friend group shuffles, and got introduced to my niece. It’s been a fair mix of good and bad, in that funny way life is.
Yeah, gaming’s effect is harder to pinpoint in the good times. I suppose I technically play better when I don’t have other things on my mind. But when the bad hits, well, I plug in. When I first made the decision to transfer, one made in about a week from the deadline for applications for this semester, I was hit with a whirlwind. After I finished being bounced around to find out how to get my transcript, I went back to my dorm and played.
I created worlds in Minecraft and deleted them to recreate them again. I sailed the seas and got my ship wrecked and treasure plundered in Sea of Thieves. I survived waves upon waves of zombies in Left 4 Dead. Yes, I’ve even Fortnite-danced.
Perhaps it’s not the healthiest coping mechanism, but as a stress relief? Oh, hell yeah. When I come home from a presentation that overwhelmed me, nothing is better than being able to see my hordes of parrots in my Minecraft house, and watch them dance to music. Even if I’m not doing what the game wants me to do, there’s something that can be found relaxing in most of them. I love sailing in Sea of Thieves and usually just do it so I can watch the water go by. If a pirate comes by and sinks my ship, well, I probably didn’t have anything on me anyway.
More importantly than being relaxing, gaming connects me to friends who I can’t hang out with anymore. Yes, theoretically my friends who live in Epsom could swing by, and those in Manchester aren’t that far, but with our lives getting busier and busier and gas always seeming to be expensive, it’s harder to organize real-life hangouts. Gaming gives us a cheaper way to hang out, and it’s not exclusive to distance. Who hasn’t gone to a small hangout with friends and played Mario Party or Mario Kart at some point or another?
But because the internet does have such a strong focus on distance, it only makes sense that one develops friendships from people far across the country. I would have never met my best friend Shaw, who lives in Texas, if it hadn’t been for gaming. Yes, technically, we met on a group chat that was for writing, but I wouldn’t have installed the application the chat was hosted on if it weren’t for my love of Guild Wars 2, and we wouldn’t have chatted as much at first if we didn’t know we both liked Monster Factory – a video game related YouTube series where two brothers create lovely creatures in games with character creators. Small coincidences like that happen so often online, more than people probably care to think about.
It’s very easy to feel isolated when your experience in college differ from others, and even easier when the school you transferred from was pea-sized and the one you’re attending now is more like a basketball. The social contact makes it harder for isolation to set in, and with the addition of stress-relief, gaming has proved important while making transitions in my life.