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2021 is the year when I learn to like to play games with my friends
I spent a lot of time to enjoy my hobby of games.Of course, I spent my childhood playing Toontown Online for several years, exploring obscure online rhythm games, and I was too young to hang out on social simulation games. IMVU. But when I think of young Mollie playing games, I would imagine her curled up alone in her mother’s greenhouse—the little space heater is shining, and there is a glass of elderflower liqueur and lemonade on the floor. Play Kingdom Hearts 2 for the fifth time on the nasty bright pink PlayStation 2 Slim.
I like to play games by myself. To be fair, I don’t have many choices. My mother had an irrational fear of the Internet, so we could not connect online until I was 18 years old. As a gamer, my father has much less fear of the World Wide Web, so I can spend four days a week online, but I am not online on weekends.
This means that when I was growing up, I never really spared too much time to spend on online games, and I was eventually attracted by JRPG very early. They are the perfect offline, single-player experience-hours of huge world and narrative, I can spend a few months to hone my entire party to the highest level. If I don’t play Japanese role-playing games, I usually hang out in fighting games. These games are not that interesting, but still provide a lot of replayability. As a teenager who grew up in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the huge drop in time made the entire “half a week without Internet” less painful.
That obsession with the solo experience allowed me to survive my entire teenage years. I occasionally play Call of Duty: Black Ops with my high school boyfriend to shoot some zombies, or make some cool things in Minecraft together. But most of my multiplayer experience still comes from the sofa co-op, hanging out in the same room with my friends while staring at the small corners of the screen we assigned. Even when I super entered Final Fantasy 14 in 2014, I went through the whole process and hardly interacted with another person.
Maybe it is because of the blockade of depression, or the whole 2020 has gone through a particularly difficult period, but when I enter the new year, the situation has changed. I don’t like games as much as I used to-I will stare at my backlog of games, I want to play games for many years, and I don’t have the motivation to dive in. Single player games are just not as popular as before. Then in January, a college friend asked me if I wanted to play Monster Hunter: World with him and some of his friends. I prefer to slam the monster once or twice, so I agreed.
It sounds a bit exaggerated to say that a simple proposal changed my relationship with the game, but no one told me that playing with your friends can be so damnable. pleasure. I changed from being away from my hobby to looking forward to logging in after get off work, jumping into the Discord phone and seeing where to take me at night. Playing with friends also helped me get out of my comfort zone for different types of games-I devoted myself to shooting games such as “Overwatch” and “Rainbow Six: Siege” and played my first Halo game this year . I even played some Dark Souls with a few friends, otherwise I would never consider this game. I went back to the games I had played alone before, such as Genshin Impact and Minecraft, and it turned out to be more fun to play with other people.
A few months ago, “Final Fantasy 14” appeared before me again. I decided to rejoin it with my Genshin buddies because I have never played with good friends before. Let us all relearn the class rotation, explore our ways in the dungeons and trials, and complete the expansion together. To be honest, this is the most interesting game I have ever played. I eventually transferred the server, received an invitation to join my friends’ guild, and found myself joining a great Endwalker team-otherwise I would never meet and get to know these people.
I have not logged out of the single player game. After all, I still need to fix the puzzling advantages of JRPG occasionally. But in a year that proved to be extremely difficult, hanging out with my friends in various virtual worlds gave me a lot of breathing opportunities. Now that I have left university and started working from home, it has proved to be a great way to keep in touch with friends who live across the country and make new friends from all over the world. I know-“Women find it fun to play games with your friends, but actually” is a tepid view. But this year it had a huge impact on me, and I couldn’t see myself going back to the old way of playing. A large number of versions are expected in 2022, and I can’t wait to see what stupid things my friends and I will encounter next year.