Polish, Funerals and Servers: How Gaming Friendships Evolved
Maybe the real reward is the friends we made along the way.
Be honest with me: when was the last time you used the phrase in real life (IRL) when talking to your online friends?
In fact, let’s up the stakes. When was the last time you thought of someone you met through online gaming as purely an online friend? Someone with no connections to your reality, best suited for a Discord server and a nickname that didn’t convey their identity?
I bet it was a long, long time ago.
We may still love nicknames and video games, but the lines between IRL and virtual aren’t so clear these days. And since gaming was (and still kinda is) a brand new form of entertainment, we did what we do with every newbie around here: we made up our own rules.
From making friends and learning Polish swearwords to specific ways of grieving, let’s check out all the ways making friends through video games changed with the times.
Getting into Strangers’ Servers
When I was growing up, making friends online was as wise as getting into a stranger’s car: not at all.
We came a long way from “be careful, they could be a 50 year-old from Ukraine who baits kids through WoW servers” to “oh, that’s just my buddy Rick, we play together all the time but his cat got sick.”
It’s a given that we’ll make friends playing games; here’s someone who loves a game as much as we do. Oh, and we also agree on who should win the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones? Amazing!
After all, every friendship starts with the same exclamation: what, you too? I thought I was the only one!
Back in the day, we discussed this on dedicated game servers. Today, we just use different channels. It’s not ideal, and we still need places like Reddit to find friends for gaming, and Discord to talk to them as we play, but we manage.
Real identity may be obscured by punny nicknames but the internet is no longer a place for voicing your strangest obsessions. Now it’s a vital part of how we reinforce our identities.
The friends we make online today are much more similar to the ones we make at work. Everything is RL.
Not Just Fun and Games
You only know how strong a community is when tragedy strikes.
In the case of gaming community (and MMORPG community in particular), it proved its worth in 2014 when one of the Final Fantasy XIV players, user Codex Vahlda, lay on his deathbed.
It was in December that one of Codex’s gaming friends alerted the community to his passing, and hundreds of players rallied together to send him off with the respect he deserved. They did it the only way they could: in-game.
Across multiple servers, players gathered for a funeral. Some knelt in his honor while others created a light show and spelled out “CODEX.”
The vigil itself was live-streamed for Codex, who was in a coma, and his family. Across various message boards, players posted condolences — only some of them actually knew him. Everyone else sympathized with the feeling of losing a friend for whom the traditional ways of grieving weren’t enough.
While the phenomenon of online friendship and specific rituals sometimes baffles us, there’s nothing weird about what the FFXIV community did. A friend like any other, Codex would be remembered.
Maybe they never shared a beer in real life but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t left his mark on his friends’ lives.
We All Speak Polish
Let me tell you something: if you told me in 2007 that half of the United States would know Polish swearwords by 2018, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Here’s a bunch of regular kids who we were never interested in learning about foreign countries and wow, look at them go mentioning other people’s mothers in Slavic languages. Video games truly are amazing.
The thing is, when we’re communicating with our gaming friends, we’re using the full power of the internet. It’s impossible to just pick someone from our country to play with — if you started out with dedicated servers, you know how often you could find someone across the world who turned out to be a really great friend.
An American might have been playing Call of Duty and talking to someone from a different country, which is why I have more English-speaking friends who know Polish and Serbian swearwords than any other. Hopefully, they don’t use them when they actually visit the countries.
And while this is a fun story to tell (because literally every gamer has a story about that one Polish buddy), it actually holds larger significance. It’s so easy to learn new things while you’re having fun, and friends made through interests that obliterate borders are the friends you want to hold on to.
Friendship is Friendship
No matter the flavor, friendship remains friendship.
Sometimes it’s a close proximity thing that develops into growing old and grey together (with or without video games), and sometimes it’s just meeting new people from all over the world whose couches we can always crash on.
Every now and then, there are stories of people looking to reconnect with friends they made through playing a long time ago. The attachment is here, and so are positive memories of good times. If that isn’t a good ground to build a friendship on, I don’t what is.
However, 2 billion gamers doesn’t mean it’s easy to make friends. With dedicated servers being a thing of the past, we are going to have to invent new ways of finding gaming (soul) mates.
From vigils specific to games to making friends who can teach us new swearwords, there are a lot of stories waiting to be told. Let’s keep hanging out, let’s keep making friends and new memories together.
And if you have a story you’d like to share, let me know. I’ll be in the comments section, interested in every friend that made your game better.
