Multiplayer Versus Life

A few weeks ago, my friends and I finally saw the end of Borderlands. Not the shiny new Borderlands 2, mind you. No, we’d finally torn through the remainder of the first one. It took us the better part of a year. It wasn’t always like this.

I’d beaten the core game shortly after it was released, but my friends and I wanted to play through all of the DLC. Simple enough, right? And once we all popped online and actually played the game, it was. Hundreds of Skags were slaughtered. Hundreds of brains were collected. I punched through so many rogue claptraps that I could have sworn my fists were bleeding. We all had a great time, but our biggest enemy turned out to be the calendar.

Three of our foursome are married. I have kids. Jeff Marchiafava is usually busy doing…whatever it is that he does (he’s mysterious). Bryan had kickball, and he seems to be booked for a wedding nearly every weekend. Ross is nearly as mysterious as Fava. Coordinating times where we could all sit down was a huge pain. Sometimes we couldn't play for months. All the while, Borderlands 2 was breathing down our collective necks.

Like I said, it didn't used to be like this. I used to have a LAN set up in my apartment, and my friends would come over and play Duke Nukem 3D until sunrise. Rounding up three people to play Super Smash Bros. was as easy as shouting “Hey, who wants to play Super Smash Bros.?” I could even find a steady stream of people willing to play Battle Arena Toshinden with me, and if you've played that game you can appreciate how difficult that could be.

Now, I find myself spending the majority of my personal gaming time wrapped up in the single-player modes. I prefer playing games with my friends, and corralling them all together has become a pain now that our lives are all so much more complicated. We’re not in college anymore, and skipping class and playing games in the dorm seems like something that happened lifetimes ago. I have loads of people on my friend lists, but they’re often doing their own things, too.

Even when I do manage to scrape up some buddies to play with, obligations pop up that I couldn’t have possibly predicted. Kids fall down and skin their knees. My wife needs to run to the store to pick up a few last-minute things. I have to leave for dinner. Whatever the reason, I’ll have to leave in a moment’s time. I hate bailing out on my friends without any explanation. It’s especially difficult because we Minnesotans like to drag out our goodbyes as long as we possibly can (the Minnesota Goodbye is a real thing). It feels incredibly rude to unplug without much more than a “Gotta go.”

This is the part where I’m supposed to say that all those things that make my life complicated are so much more fulfilling than playing Call of Duty or Borderlands 2 with my close friends. That’s mostly true. At the same time, however, I do miss the days when my close friends not only wanted to play, but were able to as well.