what gaming means to me

what gaming means to me was something I recently thought about and wanted to write about, it is quite a board topic so I'm going to split it into 2 sections, multiplayer and single player

multiplayer

the memories I look back at most fondly to are the times that I've spent having interesting conversations with friends, not the games themselves per se
I have had lots of nights that I have ended by crying, laughing, etc, with friends and one thing that is common across those nights is that we always played a game on the background, most likely minecraft or a vibe game on roblox

I wouldn't necessarily call it playing but it gave something to do passively, it gave our digital self's a place to sit, I guess it was a way of expression, dressing up our avatars for events or just for the fun!

minecraft is also great for this, half of the time you're doing something useful, the other half you're just messing around on the background while talking about the either the silliest or the deepest stuff, no in between

the vibe cafe (on roblox) was really great for this, sometimes we would sit with other people, sometimes we would go on adventures around the map, sometimes we would laugh at kids choking on gumballs for 5 hours straight (maybe that had nothing to do with the vibe cafe)

what I'm trying to say is that playing multiplayer games is more about the people/friends you play with than the game itself

single player

to be fair I haven't finished a lot of games, I like jumping from game to game, it's kinda a bad habit because I tend to drop a lot of games and never finish my backlog thanks to that

one of the outliers for me was celeste, that was such an experience, it was one of the first games I primarily finished because of the story,,, there were points I got stuck in levels but what motivated was to see the story progress, not a lot of games do that to me, or at least not triple A games

currently I'm slowly working my way through fallout new vegas because I want to finish it before season 2 of the tv show releases,,, just WOW
I know everyone says how good the game is but it is true, at first I was quite put off by its age but it does sooo many things better than modern games, the way that the quest system works blows my mind
I got stuck on one of the quests and while I was searching online for tips I kept seeing a name of a character, apparently if you visit a certain area at night you can meet a new character, which I completely missed (it does get hinted at in some dialogue but I have a peanut brain) which in turn means I nearly missed a couple of side story/quests

a good single player game to me is one where I walk away with some kind of emptiness because the story was soo good, same goes for firewatch