I can count on one hand the number of times I have been in the same place as my friends in the last year. We can get it up to two years if we don’t count individual days and just count… instances of spending time together. Weekends away, a week trip with my siblings, that sort of stuff. The pandemic and continued danger of Covid-19 keeps me pretty isolated, sure, but I also don’t really have many local friends. Or at least I don’t see them much. We’ve fallen out of contact. Which feels silly to say given that I live within easy walking distance of a pair of them (though they are the only local ones I still occasionally see, so maybe the point is moot). For years now, ever since pandemic-era isolation began, I’ve… stopped being NEAR people I care about. It is difficult. I can’t just uproot my life to be closer to friends who might then be forced to uproot themselves for various reasons. Relationships change, too, and people you once thought you could spend the rest of your life near are no longer who you thought they were. Time changes, so I’ve done what many others have done and sought solace in my digital connections.

The past year and a half of playing Final Fantasy 14 has been eye-opening. I’ve learned what this kind of digital communion can be like when you’ve got a bunch of people who care and genuinely enjoy being around each other! It has been fantastic! It has been heartbreaking as well. The Free Company I bought the game to join kicked me out because the sole owner of it and the discord community it inhabited decided that people trying to express support and concern for him was actually them trying to stage a coup. That people who were just trying to make their own fun and keep the lights on were taking him and the “resources” he provided for granted. We’ve rebuilt elsewhere. After all, it wasn’t he who made that community, it was us. We were the power that made the massive vehicle of wealth generation and comradery move forward and now, with me at the helm, we’re doing it all over again and much more closely bonded than ever as a result. Forged in fire. Or, as we like to put it, continuing to bloom despite the adversity.

Still. It can be lonely. As I’m writing this, I’m crafting an item that is the main stage of the FC’s wealth generation (there is no system I cannot crack given enough time and I WILL always find a way for all of us to make money so we can continue being generous with each other) in the relative silence of my personal room in the FC. There are others online, but they’re mostly doing their own thing. It is midnight, after all, and I wanted to play another game or do something else while working through this stack of materials. I want to make some money this week, after taking the last one off, and I’m much too worn out for active gaming anyway. Even just this typing is making my hands cramp and the pain of my shoulders and arms flare with each click and every clack of my keyboard. I’m sure if I wanted to, I could find someone to chat with, still, even as late as it is. But I also wanted some time to think.

You see, I played Big Walk the other day. With a pair of friends and three people who were friends with one of those friends. It was a fun little time, with silly music, lots of japes, and far more giggling than I expected. It was, as the name described, a big walk. We walked, sprinted, fell, swam, and shouted all over the early portions of the map, all while gleefully waving around some thing we found. We played with radios, were incredibly irresponsible with laser pointers, discovered a “backpack,” got stumped by a puzzle, and genuinely took joy in each other’s company as we moved through that space over the course of a few hours. We had racous laughter as we threw light-up balls at each other, argued about what was left and right when looking at someone from far away who was looking at a picture we had to find the local analogue to in order to unlock a puzzle, made up several rules about moving in the dark and the buddy system that we promptly ignored, and even had a few quiet, tender moments of just appreciating what we were doing and the silly little way we could interact with the world.

It is difficult to conceive that I might have looked at the collection of three stacked orbs, a strange snoot, and noodle limbs and seen my friends (none of whom I’ve met in person), but all feelings of being connected through a Discord call and ten months of friendship faded quickly. It did not take long for it to feel like I was just near my friends. It did not take much at all to get through some early quiet awkwardness to bond with one of my friends’ friends because we were the ones with the radios and who had taken it upon ourselves to occasionally lock in when we needed to get the group focused for a particular puzzle. It took barely any time at all for me to recognize people in the distance not by their colors but by the way they’d move or wiggle their arms as they walked over the landscape while I was trying to point out landmarks from atop a tower.

Going into the game, I wasn’t sure what to expect. A difference friend had suggested we play the game, but those plans fell through the morning of and I wound up getting swept up with this other group of mostly strangers, so I was already in new territory for me. And I’d spent all day reading about the game online and people’s thoughts about it, so I had a lot on my mind as I went in. The loudest opinion I heard going in, and the thing that weighed most heavily on my mind, was the fact that a lot of people were disappointed by the developer’s suggestion that this was not a game for couch co-op. Which feels weird to be true about a game about talking to your friends, but I kind of get it now that I’ve played the game. There are places in the game where no means of in-game communication save gesture can pierce the barriers separating us from our friends. There is a certain… pang of melancholy or tinge of joy to hearing your friend talking but they are too far away to make out what they’re saying. There is an intimacy in overhearing your friend quietly talking to themselves as you turn a corner and find them staring blankly at a puzzle they’re piecing together.

After playing for just a few hours, I get why they have a disclaimer at the start of the game that encourages you to not be able to hear the people you’re playing with outside of the game’s mechanisms. I get why it just isn’t the same experience if you’re sitting on the couch next to the people you’re playing with. After all, this game celebrates communication. It emphasizes the joy and power of being able to talk to people and the effort required to make that happen. It orbits around the idea that being denied something makes us appreciate it all the more when we have it. It suggests that maybe we are better off when we put in actual effort to converse rather than taking such power and ability for granted. It did not escape my notice that we started the game wandering off in our own directions constantly but ended up in clumps toward the end, connected to each other by radios we never put down, and were ALWAYS within near-earshot of each other as a result.

Maybe I’m being overly sentimental. I’m writing this after three weeks without writing a single blog post and three weeks after a moment that has left me scarred. It was not meant as such. No one meant for the conversation to turn the way it did and for people to get hurt. But we did. I did. And I could not do my usual thing of pushing through the pain because… Well, it hurt too much. I needed time to heal and process my feelings and recalibrate myself to the world I was living in, even as that shifted and left me scrambling once again to find my footing. I’ve been in a sort of self-imposed isolation as a result. I don’t want to brush off or bury this, and that’s what it takes to be around people sometimes. I can’t just put away the hurt like I used to, not now that I’ve broken free of that cycle of repression. But that meant not seeking out the company of my friends like I used to. That meant not writing my blog. I mean, I had nothing else on my mind for most of that time. For those three weeks. And I didn’t know what I thought or felt (and am still struggling). I hadn’t felt that alone in a long time. So what else could I write about? Not that. Not raw expressions of pain. The people involved have made a habit of reading this blog, after all, and I didn’t want them to see me essentially bleeding on the page before they heard it directly from me.

Until last night, when I played Big Walk, I didn’t have anything to say. I had nothing I felt compelled about or even interested in enough to write about it other than the turmoil of emotions I was dealing with. I didn’t even have anything to say about it last night. I literally thought, last night as I lay in bed and again this morning as I prepared for work: “I think I should let my blog sit empty for a while. Let myself rest more and wait until something comes along that moves me to write about it.” I’d been rereading one of my favorite webcomics again, and had just passed one of my favorite pieces that suggests that, sometimes, a situation or need doesn’t demand talent so much as talent sometimes creates the need for it to fulfill. I decided I’d stop forcing my talent to fulfill the need (daily blog posts) and let my talent create the need (to write something/express myself). And then, as I spent the day at work and thought through Big Walk and my experiences with it, I realized that maybe I had something to say after all.

Not everyone I know enjoyed the game. I know a lot of people online are still frustrated that its… clearly not intended for streaming or couch co-op with loved ones. I think that’s okay. This game doesn’t need to be for everyone. After all, there are plenty of other games out there for people to play side-by-side on the couch or to stream to their half-dozen or half-million fans. This game is for me. This game is for other people like me and our dear friends we’ve never seen (and might never see). This is, as I think about it, a game for people who have had to change their lives and relationships so that they can find solace and comfort in solely digital presences. It is a game for me. Because that’s just the thing, you know? It’s about talking to your friends and there’s just enough game there to provide a framework for you to do that in. It’s not like we spent those three hours talking about puzzles and what we were trying to accomplish. We talked about those things, sure, but we also talked about colors and how expressive we could be with just the simple controls at our disposal. About the ways we could communicate and how we felt about the world we were in and how silly we all looked and how thoughtful the game was when it came to all of the little things that made our polygonal avatars feel like people when we weren’t looking too closely. And about our lives. Dinner. The time. Sunrise. Our inability to pick up anything else. And the way the game felt like it was made for all of us to just wander around in a gaggle.

I still feel alone tonight, as I write this. I’m a lot more okay with it now, though, after feeling like I got to spend some time near my friends. That doesn’t fix anything, of course, but it still helps. It might have even been just what I needed.

Also, happy anniversary. It has been five years since I dusted this thing off and got back to posting. I hope it won’t take another three weeks for me to feel anything strongly enough to write about it.