In my opinion, most people have this perception that the people who stay in your life are the only ones that matter. They’re the most loyal, and they’re the “right” people to have by your side. However, I think that things that don’t last are just as important as the things that do. I believe that not everything is going to work out, but those experiences are just as valuable.
During quarantine in 2020 and 2021, there was a resurgence in playing video games that were typically older or came from a place of nostalgia. One of these games was Minecraft, which I had played in elementary and middle school. With its rising popularity because of streamers like Dream and Technoblade, that gave it a larger player base. All of this combined with my freshman year of college being one of relative isolation, with only a few local friends to my name, hooked me right back in.
And you know what? For a little while, it worked. I had a small close-knit group of friends on the main server I played on (it was only for people my age, which was another bonus), and we called almost every day. My best friend had started playing with me, which brought it more into “real life”. We started to branch out to other games, and then just video and audio calls for hours.
Then the server went down. The owner didn’t want to keep it up any more, even though there was a sudden influx of players from a YouTube video spotlight. We had a realm, but slowly players started to drop off without their main source of entertainment. It makes sense! Without the main thing people wanted to do, there was less interest in the game in general. In a month or two, there was only a couple of people left. And then we all started to drift apart.
As most friend groups are, there was some drama. One guy liked another girl, and she didn’t feel the same way. Things went somewhat back to normal, but it wasn’t ever the same as it used to be. We beat the final bosses on our Minecraft realm, and then we all kind of stopped talking to each other. People got jobs and were far less active. The realm subscription expired, and most of us, myself included, stopped playing Minecraft regularly a little after that. We don’t really talk to each other often anymore. I’m still close with the previously mentioned best friend, and we live together now, but we were friends before all of this happened.
Despite this, I don’t think I regret the experiences that I shared with these people even though I’ll probably never talk to them more than once every few months again. I got to experience closeness with other people during quarantine, when I didn’t really have many people there for me, being an out-of-state student who originally knew nobody coming here. I’ll always appreciate the late-night calls with people and the friendships that formed out of it. Was our group doomed to fail because many of these people are online friendships? That probably played a part, but it doesn’t mean that getting to know these people was worthless. Not everything is supposed to work out, and the most important thing you can take away from these “failed” relationships, in my opinion, is your memories and new knowledge. As long as you were, at some point, truly happy, then I don’t see how that can be counted as a loss.
(Obviously this is a very rough draft, and I’ll probably have to do a couple of drafts after this! I have a couple other options I can use if this experience isn’t impactful enough, or I can go into more detail. See tags for me talking a little bit more about some specific things I was unsure about.)
1. I love this! Your conflict is very clear, and you told it in a very good way. I was engaged and wanted to hear more.
2. Maybe talk more about how it made you feel, not just what happened.
3. By sharing more personal details about how your friends and playing games together, the story would be better.
4. Yes, your belief matched perfectly and it was a good story to tell to show it.
5. More details about feelings!