These days, anyone who talks to me about video games hears a key phrase in my lexicon. “Oh, I watched my friend play this at Gamer Night.” “I need to install it in time for Gamer Night!” “I finally finished it during Gamer Night last night.” As of 2020, my Thursday night is Gamer Night and it changed everything for me.
I’m not the only one who brags about having friends, although I’m very grateful to have them. If you were a lonely kid growing up like I was, you’ll probably understand how amazed I feel that I have consistent friendships, let alone a years-long, steady commitment to seeing (virtually) the same group of people every week. You might be thinking I don’t have any friends who would want to do it. Or maybe you think We’re all too busy for that.
I was thinking about all these things too, and not so long ago. Before it became embedded in my life as a permanent weekly commitment (albeit one that any of us could skip 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, from a planning point of view. Before Gamer Night, I had a rather loose approach to the game. Every now and then a great multiplayer game would come along that I wanted to try, and sometimes I’d manage to convince a few friends to play it with me. This will always involve some irritating planning shenanigans, and will almost never happen as often as any of us would like. It was a perfectly good way to live. But I had no idea how much Better can be.
Gamer Night was born in my own life as a result of organizing a group of gamers for a multiplayer game. It started in the fall of 2019, when two friends and I got really fired up fate 2, which has a lot of co-op activities for three players. This led us to try some raids, which are more intense cooperative multiplayer activities fate 2 which require six people and therefore a lot of scheduling coordination. It ended up being too much effort for all of us to maintain, but in the process we ended up with a weeknight for the four of us who were most interested in the idea of getting together in a Discord voice call and playing together. We chose to call it “Gamer Night” because it was fun. Stuck.
It didn’t take long for Gamer Night to evolve into an even more ideal format. It’s no longer a weekly multiplayer game event — it doesn’t have to be, anyway. It’s still game night with friends, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all playing the same game. We can play four completely different games. Two of us can play Overwatch 2 match together while someone else watches the match and the fourth plays Elden Ring. Three of us can watch a fourth play Dark souls, offering advice if needed or just talking about our lives. The four of us might not be playing a game at all, but instead just watching a Twitch stream of a game and talking crap 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 7:30pm and leave at 9:30pm (Unfortunately, I’ve found that if I play a video game too late at night, I can’t sleep—hence the early sign-off for this from my sleep hygiene.) Sometimes my friends start early or finish later, and like I said before, sometimes one of us can’t be there. But it almost always happens because the results are rewarding. The goal was initially to have time to play games together, especially multiplayer games, without scheduling issues – but it ended up being something that bonded the four of us even more than when we started, which is impressive considering that we all already liked each other quite a bit.
So, I leave you with this directive: Plan a weekly Gamer Night. It’s two hours – it starts when you finish dinner and ends before you have to get ready for bed. You spend time playing video games, which is fun, but you are really make time to be with your friends, which is even better. You will not regret.
