Gaming Gave Me a Life (article)

Since I can remember, my mother has always told me to be myself because that is the person other people would love. However, in middle school (grades six-eight, alternately called junior high school) the last thing other students and I ever wanted to be was ourselves. Puberty hit many of us like a tractor-trailer. Some lucky popular students were tall, skinny, and always wore the best clothes from Aeropostale. Unfortunately, for some kids this tractor-trailer took its time driving down the puberty parkway, causing them to be “unpopular” in terms of junior high school standards. In order to keep these poor souls’ thoughts from their exclusion from the hip social circles, many of them played sports, participated in clubs, and exercised. Unlike most other children, I played computer games.

The worst years of my life were in junior high school. Currently I am only 20, but never in my life have I been more ridiculed and judged than in middle school. Being relatively short, overweight, and dyslexic I did not really fit in any type of social groups at my school. Granted, even though I was not the best looking kid, I assumed I would be accepted by some group. Regrettably, I was not.

Nobody, including my friends from elementary school, wanted anything to do with me. No hanging out after school or eating with anybody during lunch. I went to school, sat in class, did my work, and went home, only to repeat the process for 180 days. Depression, overeating, and anger built within my body. Why did nobody like me? What was wrong with me? Day after day more questions like these circulated through my head. At my lowest

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point in junior high school, I felt that I had nobody beside me. (To kids of this age, the love of parents does not count!) Regardless of everything my parents did, a feeling of emptiness consumed me. Nothing mattered and it was the only time in my life that I felt like a true loser. Little did I know that one Christmas and one video game would change my life for years to come.

On December 25, 2006 I opened a neatly wrapped box. As an overjoyed child on Christmas I tore the wrapping paper on the gift to get to the presents from Santa. It was pure bliss when I found my first multiplayer capable computer game, Star Wars: Battlefront II (2005). That same day I ran into my basement, installed the game, and played for hours. Fast-forward a few weeks after I had beaten the game a few times, I decided to play my first online multiplayer match against other people around the globe. Before I was able to enter into my first online match, the game had asked me for a nickname. I was not about to use my real name so it was the first time I used bigman118, a name I would go by for years online when I played Star Wars Battlefront 2. Bigman118 depicted me as large, with a virtual mask on. Soon after I clicked the enter key on the keyboard, I was tossed into a dramatic fight against the “Empire scum.” Among the outsiders (as I was in those years), the Rebels who fought evil were the best. Minutes quickly turned to hours, until I noticed in the upper left hand corner of the game yellow text running down my screen. People were talking with one another while they were playing the game. Hesitantly, because of my horrendous experiences in school with other kids, I gained the courage to type and therefore “talk” to them while gaming. As a result, a conversation ensued between a player named Darky and myself about casual things like Star Wars: Battlefront II and even how our day was going.

After the match had ended he instructed me to install Xfire, an online gaming communication service to keep in contact with him and his friends that he introduced me to. This was a first for me, because I was able to have a conversation with people other than my parents. Darky and his friends had no idea who I was, what I looked like, or what my background was, but they all accepted me for who I was. Not once was I judged or ridiculed for being myself. The only thing that mattered to them was playing the game

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with me and being able to keep in contact with me. Even though I could not meet them in person, I was still able to type to them either in Star Wars: Battlefront II or on Xfire. This was so new to me and I became filled with happiness and joy. I can even vividly remember running home from the bus stop to jump onto my computer to talk to my friends; I finally had my first set of friends online. After so many years, this void in my being was beginning to be filled.

As the years went on and I got older, I played innumerable games. Some titles included Call of Duty, Runescape, and League of Legends. I spent an enormous amount of time on the computer video gaming, anywhere from eight to ten hours a day, playing and communicating with friends from all over the world. I had friends in Germany, Denmark, Australia, and in all locations around the United States. People that genuinely cared about me; people I could call friends, people that liked me for me. At the same time, I was irritating my parents by spending so much time on the computer, “wasting my life away on the machine,” as they would say. They could never know that I was using the computer to communicate with friends in order to escape the “real” world, where I had no friends. It happened to be just another day on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) that I met a pair of kids in a capture the flag match, named Slip and Kfcchicken. These two kids would become my greatest friends online and happened to live in New Jersey like myself. Both Slip and Kfcchicken gave me the type of friendship I wished I could always have in real life.

One day when I was 17, I was able to meet them in real life. It was at this time that I began to worry if the bliss of my online friends would come to an end. Those questions in middle school began to swirl around my head once again, causing me to revert into a fearful child once again. No matter the case, I built up enough courage to make the 35-minute trek down to their house. Just as I arrived to their house I saw Slip sitting on his porch, dumbfounded that I even showed up to meet him. Being welcomed in with a warm handshake from both Slip and Kfcchicken we all hung out and had a good time; something I never expected to happen. Even in person, these people that I met online and gamed with every single day still liked me for the person they knew I was. I was not shunned like I was in middle school. We were all friends,

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sitting around talking about anything that came to mind. I soon became an emotional mess, crying inside my own mind at the fact that I had friends that actually cared for me. Even though my online social group was so near and dear to my heart, I had my first social group outside of my Internet gaming life. To this day they still know me as Vap0r (my current online alias while gaming) and are still my best friends that I would do anything for. In addition, this was the first of many gatherings to happen. I felt so alive from the feeling of having true friends.

When my mother told me to always be myself because that is the person people would love, it turned out she was never wrong; I just had never found the right people to call my friends. Most importantly, it was the first time I felt like I had a life worth living, with people around who loved me for me.

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