My 29th birthday was a pretty bad day.
I’d only been in Santa Fe for a couple of months, and I work from home — so my pool of local friends was pretty shallow. The one person I’d had been hanging out with the most was out of town for the weekend, so I’d intended to take myself on a long, lingering hike for the occasion… and then dropped the heaviest glass I own on my pinkie toe the night before. To add insult to (literal) injury, I woke up the following morning with the kind of toothache that made me grateful for a trip to the dentist. Which I did take. On my birthday. My hygienist gave me a free bottle of prescription-strength mouthwash to mark the occasion, told me not to tell his boss.
While a lot of the birthday mess was just plain bad luck, the loneliness portion was pretty straightforward. Moving is hard for everybody, and doubly so when you’re A: an introvert and B: a remote worker. How do you make friends when you’re slightly scared of human interaction and you aren’t forced into social situations by your day job?
I’ll tell you how. You find, and join, a game night.
Although I have a history with video games — one that left a bad taste in my mouth when I looked up and realized I’d spent the eighteenth year of my life immersed in World of Warcraft rather than exploring Boston, where I lived at the time — I was never much of a board gamer. Monopoly or Jenga at family gatherings, maybe, but I’d never, say, pulled the trigger and joined a D&D campaign.
But I’ll be frank: I was pretty desperate for friends, and having something to gather around sounded like a good way to lubricate the situation. So I found a local board gaming group on Meetup, and I went.
What I found there changed the way I thought about Santa Fe, a place that is, though vibrant and beautiful and art-filled, also replete with old, rich white people playing cowboy in their adobe mansions. But gathered around the table at that brewery were 20-somethings and 40-somethings alike, with sharp wits and staggering senses of humor. They wore Totoro t-shirts and braided their long hair into their beards. They worked in libraries and labs and hotel lobbies, and they didn’t give a single fuck that I wasn’t drinking beer with them.
Game night got me out of the house, which I needed regardless. But it also introduced me to the world of board gaming beyond the Mattel set. Together, we sat around tables and conquered challenging narratives: being stranded on a desert island; trying to fix a rocket ship before it blew up. Even in games of a more standard competitive structure, there was a spirit of collaboration that transcended the play. The type of people at game night laid out their Cards Against Humanity cards so that they faced the audience — because the real point of the game is to amuse the group, not to win.
Game night changed my mind about gaming, which I’d been skeptical about since I broke my MMO habit. I’d seen it as a toxic escape, a self-donned pair of blinders keeping the player from real experiences. But that’s not the whole picture. While games can be addictive and reductive, they also have the power to build skill and increase player confidence. Games can even be used to put our human potential to work on important problems — which means they can literally change the world.
But even at their most basic level, a multi-player game is a way to connect with others over a shared goal, which is a powerful force in the face of an increasingly isolating culture. (Most) games are made to be shared, and that’s enough to make them worthwhile.
Although I’m deeply enamored of the desert, chances are I won’t stay here forever. I’ve always had trouble keeping still for any length of time. But no matter where I land next, I do know one of the first things I’ll look — for after finding the very best bookstore and coffee shop in town, of course.