It’s a little sad because I don’t think competition necessarily has to be toxic, and I think in some ways it can be really beautiful and help people form meaningful connections… but I don’t think I have ever seen a game that manages to pull this off.

I’ve really been craving the community lately, though. I want to make friends on online games and have a good time… but I just don’t want to be stressed about competition. But I also don’t really want something that’s a more casual goofing around game, or cooperative (which can be stressful on its own because people can have expectations), or creative where you make things together (which can be great, but I feel too spent to do this most of the time haha). Journey and Death Stranding do a really good job of making me feel more connected to people and that was really important to me during the pandemic (I still feel kind of bitter and resentful about how selfish some people were during that mess, and it’s made it hard for me to want to be around people)… they’re pretty low stress and the interactions are so minimal, but you can pretty much only have a positive impact on somebody else in those games and it just made me feel good and feel like I wanted to be a part of humanity instead of just rejecting it entirely. It’s particularly brilliant in Death Stranding because it made me play the game very differently. In most games I would hoard items and make things harder for myself in case I needed them more later, but in Death Stranding I would think about what would be convenient and helpful for other players and go out of my way to build that nice ladder, or zip line, or whatever… because I wasn’t just building it for me! I was building it to help other people out, and that was just really special and genius. Loved it.