Plan a gamer night: it’s life-changing
These days, anyone who talks to me about video games hears a key phrase in my lexicon. “Oh, I saw my friend playing that at Gamer Night.” “I have to install it in time for Gamer Night!” “I finally finished it last night during Gamer Night.” Since 2020, my Thursday night has been Gamer Night, and it has changed everything for me.
This isn’t just me bragging about having friends, even though I’m very grateful that I do. If you were a lonely kid growing up like me, you can probably imagine how amazed I feel to have consistent friendships, let alone a years-long commitment to meeting (pretty much) the same group of people every week. You may think, I don’t have any friends who would want to do that. Or maybe you think: We’re all too busy for that.
I thought all those things too, and not so long ago. Before it became entrenched in my life as a regular weekly obligation (albeit one that any of us can spare, since there are four of us and Gamer Night is just as much fun with three or two), the whole idea of Gamer Night seemed unnecessary . and perhaps even impossible in terms of planning. Before Gamer Night, I had a more freewheeling approach to playing games. Every now and then there would be a cool multiplayer game that I wanted to try, and sometimes I managed to convince a few friends to play it with me. That would always involve some annoying scheduling scandals, and it would almost never happen as often as any of us would like. That was a great way to live. But I had no idea how much better it could be.
Gamer Night came about in my own life as a result of organizing a player group for a multiplayer game. It started in the fall of 2019, when two friends and I got really into it Lot 2, which has plenty of three-player co-op activities. This led to us trying some raids, which are more intensive cooperative multiplayer activities Lot 2 which requires six people and therefore a lot of planning coordination. Ultimately, that was way too much for all of us to maintain, but along the way we settled on a weekly evening for the four of us who most liked the idea of consistently getting together in a Discord voice call and gaming. together. We chose to call it “Gamer Night” because it was funny. It stuck.
It didn’t take long for Gamer Night to evolve into an even more ideal format. It’s no longer a weekly event for multiplayer games – at least not necessarily. It’s still a night to play games with friends, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all playing the same game. Maybe we’re playing four completely different games. Two of us might play one Overwatch 2 match together while someone else watches the match and the fourth person plays Elden Ring. Three of us can watch a fourth person play Dark souls, giving advice where necessary, or simply taking the wind out of our sails about our lives. Maybe the four of us don’t play a game at all and instead just watch a Twitch stream of a game and talk shit about it. All of these activities are Gamer Night.
Perhaps the most important part of this is that Gamer Night is only two hours long, at least for me. I show up at 7:30 PM and leave at 9:30 PM (tragically, I’ve noticed that if I play a video game too late at night, I can’t sleep – hence the early cancellation for sleep hygiene reasons.) Sometimes my friends start earlier or they end later, and like I said before, sometimes one of us can’t be there. But it almost always happens because the results are worth it. The point was originally to have time to play games together, especially multiplayer games, without the hassle of scheduling, but it ended up being something that has bonded all four of us even more together than when we started, which is impressive considering the fact that we all already liked each other quite a bit.
And so I leave you with this guideline: Plan a weekly Gamer Night. It lasts two hours: it starts when you finish eating and ends before you have to get ready for bed. You make time to play video games, which is fun, but that’s what you do Real make time to be with your friends, which is even better. You will have no regrets.