ganbatte.

Grind those fingers.

There’s something about gaming that creates a bond of its own. Without all the PvPing and team killing, of course.

Sure, I know that Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai might turn into a harem anime after a couple of episodes instead of dealing with the in-depth issues of friendships (man, what was my brain thinking with its standards), but I promised this anime a good rant.

With friends, you have the people who are split between single-player only, competitive gaming, and the rare and elusive (for me) just gaming.

Insert sparkles here and such.

I had a circle of friends I played usually with, MSNing during the weekends to set up gaming times, and then we would go in to any MMO/FPS we set our eyes on and had the fun while shooting the shit. One game I remember which I had spent a lot of time with was Mabinogi. Sure, it had its many flaws (cash based and repetitive gameplay), but that wasn’t what I played it for. I had joined what seemed to be a perfect guild, going online daily, logging onto Ventrilo, and just have fun in the events or go out on a dungeon raid together. Fun times. Unfortunately, what was a small guild eventually grew into a large guild, as many guild leaders aspire for. I was against it at first, seeing as the status quo was perfectly fine, but went ahead with it in the end.

And sometimes that is the problem with large guilds. You simply lose the bond you had with each other and “hey, let’s do Peaca for fun” becomes “helping another guild member on beginners quest for the whole day, sorry “.

Which is when I went into my second phase. Most of the time, I used to game competitively in games such as SC and other RTSes. At first, it was all fun and games, but sooner or later it became too time-consuming for me to keep up with. I sighed when I got my test results back as I definitely knew that I could have done better if I didn’t waste my time increasing APM and actually studied. Both were tedious and time-consuming, but I had not learned the common sense of opportunity costs.

Yesterday, I saw some guys playing some Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering. I was going to laugh, but then I saw that they were having more fun than I had ever had in a long while.

Sometimes I forget to game for its original purpose, to have fun. Just like how sometimes I forget that I’m blogging for the sake of blogging. Sure, micro/being bi-winning all the time is important as well, but there are times when a game simply doesn’t feel like a game any more.

That’s why LoL is such an awesome game and I love it!

In before flame/tl;dr/I know this already.

Post dedicated to Hitomari. I miss you bro. We had some good times.