Virtual encounters to real friendships: The impact of a gaming community in my life

There are things we do in life, choices we make that we don’t think much of initially, but ends up impacting our lives one way or another. And one such decision I made on a whimsy on a random evening of early 2018- to download and play a rather unfamous turn-based tactical JRPG called The Alchemist Code (which I will be referring as TAC moving forward).

It all started when I decided to go to the in-game world chat. And if any of you have any experience with global chats in any games, yes, it was exactly the same. People were having all kinds of conversations ranging from normal wholesome discussions to rather inappropriate roleplays.

 

I was in 8’th grade at that time, and let’s just say I wasn’t in a very healthy headspace. So, having a game and a community to have fun with in that manner was a nice escape from reality.

 

Something I want to mention before moving forward is, every name (including mine) would be either the in-game usernames or the discord account names. So, bear with me as it might contain silly or inappropriate names. Now, let’s introduce some individuals that are worth mentioning-

 

·        Oppai Sama: The man himself (me).

·        Fowl and Madao: Two Indian dudes around my age that I ended up pretty good friends with.

·        K (Yes, just the letter ‘K’): Someone (German) I got to know a year after when creating my own guild and one of my closest online friends to this date.

·        Caden and Jery: More close guildmates of mine. Caden being around the same age and Jery being on the older side.

·        Ken: A Pakistani man that I catfished for over a year just for the memes.

 

Early on, it was just about having fun, playing Co-op, goofy roleplays, getting to know each other and whatnot. But the in-game chat can only take you so long, and around early 2019, we all were in discord servers together. And let’s just say, it’s hard to grasp just how many kinds of people exists out there without exploring discord servers like that. So, what started with TAC became much more where we had fun not only playing that game together but also having deep conversations, having movie nights together or playing other games whether that be web-games like scribble or other games.

 

While we did have a large community, people were closer to some than others, and same goes for me. Me and fowl used to play a lot of Co-op in that game while me and Madao had such good mental synergy that people couldn’t distinguish us even if we switched our accounts.

 

But the close ties really started when TAC implemented the guild system, which I made my own. And there, I was fortunate enough to get to know K, Caden and Jery (the others I mentioned a bit earlier were also in the guild).  We talked a lot in our guild server and for me specifically, I got to know and had to talk with a lot of people due to being the captain. Details of what we had to do in the game aside, Caden became a really nice friend and helped me a lot when I was in a really bad headspace which I don’t think he ever realized. K was the resident jokester with Jery being the sensible one in the group.

 

It's necessary to mention that I spent a rather unhealthy amount of time in that game (5000h+ to my own estimation) with a decent time in discord itself.

(Screenshot of number of texts sent by me just in my guild server alone)

The guild was like a second home to me, with getting to know more and more people each day and having our own little community. We would have our own fun sessions in voice chat, and something worth mentioning is one of the older guild members even streamed a part of his wedding to us. Though we had a fair share of controversies as well where some American guy went full Martin Luther King mode on me due to me making a separate channel in the server for him to share furry art in.

And I cannot but mention that Ken guy (username shouu in-game) again who I catfished for a decent time. It was something we all came forward and laughed at whenever we got silly texts from him (He was very bad in English). Here are a couple that I can share without going too explicit:

Now TAC global server had shut down on April 2023, but the close friends I made and the connections we had are fortunately still there. We still talk often in our server whether that be related to personal stuffs or other games that we are playing in current time. It feels pretty nice to have friends like this from online only where even after almost 6 years, we can still come together and have fun.

 

PS: If you want to know further details about any incident that I cannot put in the blog due to obvious reasons, feel free to reach out.