These past few weeks have been rough. People are tired, frustrated and emotions are raw. That’s all I will say about that. This piece isn’t about what is bad or frustrating about games, but instead about what is so very good. It’s about the ways we find friends and keep them, how memories are formed and treasured when we play games, and how our lives can become so much richer when we play.

When I was 13 years old, my best friend committed suicide. It was a cold January morning just after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. I woke up before the alarm went off. My bedroom was dark and the house seemed unnaturally quiet. I walked to the spiral staircase leading downstairs. I stopped. I could hear my mother talking very quietly to someone else. She must have heard me because she called out to me. She wanted me to come downstairs but she wouldn’t say why. I ended up sitting beside her at the kitchen counter when she told me what had happened. She told me I didn’t have to go to school, but I could. It’s all so fuzzy now. I did go. I walked to school alone in the cold, ice and snow crunching under my sneakers. When I got to school, I didn't speak to anyone until the announcement came over the intercom. I sat in a quiet stupor most of the day while everyone else around me seemed to be reacting much more than I could. I suppose it was because I felt like I was blindsided. I honestly didn’t see it coming, or maybe I did sense it was possible, but I never imagined it would actually happen.

That part of my life with her is something that I resist the urge to dwell on. What happened at the end isn’t the sum total of who she was. What I do think about, what my mind often goes to, is Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom. After two straight years of playing that game, off and on, the farthest we ever got was about halfway. We became stumped. I remember that we had an umbrella and no idea what to do with it. For those who are unfamiliar, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom is an adventure game that operates with very basic commands chosen from a menu. The areas are depicted by pictures with minimal movement and sound. You must talk to people in those areas and take and use items to progress. When you complete a chapter, you get a password and the next chapter begins. It’s very much like a text adventure with simple visuals.

We tried to beat Princess Tomato by ourselves. There was no Internet, no place to go to suss out the game’s secrets with others, it was just the two of us trying to put our brains together and get through it, one step at a time. When we managed to finish a chapter, we were so excited. It was a slow process. We didn’t always play that game and we would get frustrated and give up sometimes, but when we progressed, it was a fantastic feeling of triumph and relief. Looking back, I know that the game was not great. On a list of adventure games, it probably wouldn’t crack anyone’s Top 10, or even a Top 100, but it still holds a little place in my heart. It was a game that helped me create memories of a person that I still miss terribly, even though she’s been gone now for almost 20 years.

There are other games that make me think of her too. M.C. Kids, which was a game that was unbelievably fun and of a surprisingly high quality for being tied to the McDonald's Restaurant chain. We ended up renting it multiple times from Sounds Easy, a local movie and video game rental store that was just a five-minute walk up the street from my house. It was another game that, try as we might, we couldn’t beat. The difficulty level would go from easy to monstrously difficult. And, instead of progression being tied to finishing the level and then the next like most NES platformers, it was tied to collecting “M” cards throughout those levels. Without the right amount of cards, you couldn’t get further in the game. Even with the game becoming too difficult for us to complete, we still kept going back to it. We were gluttons for punishment, or maybe we just really enjoyed the game.

As we grew up, we also grew away from the Nintendo and into other platforms. Only a few months before that frosty January morning, we were huddled around the PC in her family's dining room. It was her 13th birthday and she had invited a group of friends over for a slumber party. We were going to eat junk food, watch horror movies, and play Wolfenstein 3D. We each took a turn with the keyboard and mouse. Whenever one of us would die, or get to a new area, we would trade off. Finally, after maybe an hour or two, we got to the final level in the first episode. I remember another girl was in the chair, and the rest of us were looking over her shoulder telling her to walk one way or another and trying to spot enemies or items before she did. We had no idea what was coming. As soon as she opened that door and Hans Grosse yelled and started shooting, we screamed and every last one of us, probably seven teenage girls, ran away from the computer, some into the kitchen and some into the hallway. Obviously, we died, but we didn't care. It was probably on of the silliest moments that I have had playing a video game with other people. And it's a moment that never fails to put a smile on my face.

That is what games have the power to do. Yes, they can be pieces of art that make us feel and think about issues on a deeper level, but they also have a very basic function. They allow us to have fun with each other, to connect with each other, to form moments in time with other people that we can look back on fondly. As we grow older, we can lose people in our lives, whether it is a function of the natural passage of time and growing apart as individuals, or whether it is something more sudden, a friend who is lost much too soon to comprehend. When I think about games, I want to remember that for all the discussions we have as a community and all the arguments we can get swept up in, we still have this amazing hobby that brings us together. Let's not lose that. Let's not lose each other. Let's make those memories last and find those rare and wonderful islands of common ground.

And then, let's play some games.