Anyone who asks me about video games today hears a key phrase in my vocabulary: “Oh, I watched my friend play it at Gamer Night.” “I have to install it in time for Gamer Night!” “I finally finished playing it last night at Gamer Night.” Since 2020, my Thursday night has been Gamer Night and that changed everything for me.
I’m not just bragging about having friends, although I’m very grateful for them. If you grew up lonely as a child like I did, you can probably relate to how amazed I am to have lasting friendships, not to mention a years-long commitment to meeting (virtually) with the same group of people every week. You might be thinking: I don’t have any friends who would do something like that. Or you may be thinking: We are all too busy for that.
I used to think all of these things too, and it wasn’t that long ago. Before it became a permanent weekly commitment in my life (albeit one that any of us can miss, 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 maybe even impossible in terms of scheduling. Before Gamer Night, I had a more casual attitude to gaming. Every now and then there would be a cool multiplayer game I wanted to try out, and sometimes I managed to convince a few friends to play it with me. This always involved some annoying scheduling tricks and it almost never happened as often as any of us wanted. This was a perfectly fine way to live. But I had no idea how much better
Gamer Night was born in my own life as a result of organizing a group of players for a multiplayer game. It started in the fall of 2019 when two friends and I were totally excited Fate 2which offers a lot of three-player co-op activities. This led us to try out some raids, which are more high-intensity co-op multiplayer activities. Fate 2 that requires six people and therefore a lot of scheduling coordination. In the end, it was far too much effort for all of us, but over time we settled on a weekly evening for four of us who were most interested in the idea of getting together regularly via Discord voice call and pl aying games together. We called it “Gamer Night” because it was fun. 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 – not necessarily anyway. It’s still a night of playing with friends, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all playing the same game. We might play four completely different games. Two of us might play one Overwatch2 Play together while someone else watches and the fourth person plays Elden Ring. Three of us might watch a fourth person playing Dark Soulsgive advice when needed, or just chat about our lives. Maybe all four of us don’t play a game at all, but instead just watch a Twitch stream of a game and chat about it. All of these activities are Gamer Night.
Perhaps the most important thing about it is that Gamer Night is only two hours, at least for me. I arrive at 7:30pm and leave at 9:30pm (tragically, I’ve discovered that if I play a video game too late at night, I can’t sleep – so I leave early for the sake of my sleep hygiene). Sometimes my friends start earlier or they finish later, and as I said, sometimes one of us can’t make it. But that almost always happens because the results are rewarding. Originally, it was about having time to play games together, especially multiplayer games, without the stress of schedules – but it ended up bonding the four of us even more than when we started, which is impressive considering we all liked each other quite a bit already.
And so I leave you with this instruction: Schedule a weekly gamer night. It lasts two hours – it starts when you finish dinner and ends before you have to get ready for bed. You take the time to play video games, which is fun, but you are Really Taking the time to be with your friends is even better. You won’t regret it.