Gaming with Friends

When I use the term "gaming" here, I don't mean playing ranked League of Legends against other players half way across the country. I mean playing exclusively with your friends. Games that involve just you and people you know are soothing to the soul. It just feels right, and I wonder if theres some sort of evolutionary/psychological reason as to why.

I remember back in middle school, I purchased Duck Game on this little shitty laptop that I used to bring around. After class, I'd play on the keyboard and my best friend would play with a controller, and we'd belly laugh while shooting eachother in the face. The game was just pure fun, and its still one of my favorite games.

When I began playing STRAFTAT, the same friend (almost 10 years later) mentioned how similar it is to Duck Game, and after thinking about it, I agree. Both games are these round-based, fast-paced, shoot-in-the-face clusterfucks. They have high skill ceilings, but they're still fun even if you're bad. I really, really like STRAFTAT, and I feel like its one of those "perfectly fun games".

I've attributed it to the fact that there's no ranked scene, but I don't think thats exclusively it. Plenty of games don't have a ranked scene, so why wasn't I as drawn to them as I was STRAFTAT or Duck Game. I really think its the fact that they're both games that are meant to be played with friends, almost like a couch party game.

When I would play Duck Game, I was always trying to improve, but it wasn't to climb some arbitrary leaderboard like I would in League of Legends or Overwatch. It was almost completely an intrinsic thing. I wanted to get good partially because it would be really cool to myself, but I also wanted to impress my friends. To me, being a high rank in Overwatch isn't impressive in the slightest, ranked ladders like that are horribly exploitable and mostly rely on playtime rather than skill (these two are commonly correlated, but i wont digress).

The idea that you can find a full 9 other players at any point in time across the entire globe sort of ruins the sort of enjoyment that comes out of playing with your friends. I'm sad that these friend-fighting party games aren't really popular as much now. I've got a few groups of friends who organize gaming nights once a week/month to try to play more obscure games together (King Arthur's Gold, Intruder, Supreme Commander, etc.), and I think thats a really cool idea that people need to do more. If you've got any friends that do that sort of thing, you really should consider joining them next time.