Think about all the people you’ve gamed with throughout the years, even those guys you had a passing encounter with. Maybe they said something funny on VC, maybe they healed you at risk of their own life, maybe they were following you around and constantly meleeing you despite being on your team. Think about how many of those guys who were just pixelated representations on your screen that all sported some obscure gamertag. Their gamertag might’ve been funny, witty, offensive, or even downright bizarre. Perhaps their gamertag was an inside joke they had with themselves, holding within it some private, sentimental meaning.

Think about how many of those guys have since passed away. Maybe you called them a slur. Maybe you friended them and played a few more games. Maybe you got an invite from them a couple of times and declined it cus you forgot where you know them from. Maybe they were on with you gaming late into the night and you guys had some heart to heart where you just sat in a lobby talking, opening up to a stranger about real heavy stuff cus you knew you’d never meet irl and they wouldn’t judge you. Maybe they always had this weird looking avatar that you could never determine what it was. Maybe they were just a pathetic stat at the end of the match as you saw their name listed with a horrible score and you wondered how they could play so badly. Maybe you heard their baby crying through their mic, their mom yelling at them, a dog barking. Maybe they told everyone on the server that their gf just broke up with them and, in a rare show of compassion and brotherhood, everyone set aside their toxicity for a moment to dust off the guy’s shoulders, help him back on his feet, and give him some encouraging words. Maybe you’d see them listed as perpetually online, playing some obscure single player game seemingly 24/7. Maybe the sight of that green dot next to their name in your friends list was enough to make you feel less alone during times when you were gaming a lot more and a lot later into the night than you knew you should’ve.

For those brief moments when our lost and vacant souls collide online in these virtual worlds of illusion, fantasy, and violence entertainment, we love each other. We hate each other. We say the ugliest, most hateful things to others that we would never dare say in real life, we hear the funniest things we’ve ever heard. For a couple of minutes every so often, we get to be the heroes we wish we were, winning battles, saving lives, defeating evil and cheating death. We get to do it alongside randoms who in that brief instant prove themselves as our brothers in victory and our nemeses in defeat. In this world, death has no consequence. Humiliation is as easy to escape as pressing a button. But the fellowships we form end up just as fleeting as those few and far between moments of glory.

Maybe now, those same players you once fought and died alongside but who have since left their mortal bodies simply sit as grey names in your friends list as…

• last online: over a year ago