My thumb is twitching over the X button, but I can’t bring myself to press it. The title screen for a game called ‘Star-Bound Drifters’ is looping a synth-wave track that sounds like a refrigerator dying a slow, expensive death in an empty warehouse. This is the 29th minute I’ve spent staring at the menu, not because the game is enticing, but because David-my best friend since I was 9 years old-told me it would change my soul. He sent me the Steam key with a note that said ‘this is exactly your vibe,’ and now I am paralyzed by the horrifying realization that David has no idea who I actually am. The cursor blinks at 99 percent loading capacity, a digital heart attack frozen in time, mirroring that specific frustration when a video buffers at the very end of its progress. You are so close to the thing, yet the thing refuses to manifest.
❝
There is a particular kind of violence in a recommendation from someone who claims to love you. It’s a polite, social assault. When a stranger on a forum suggests a title, you can dismiss it with the flick of a wrist. But when it comes from the person who saw you through your first breakup and your 29th existential crisis, the suggestion carries the weight of an identity crisis.
❝
If David thinks I like hyper-realistic survival sims with 199 different crafting recipes for various types of artisanal mud, then what have we been talking about for the last decade? Have I been performing a version of myself that likes mud? Or worse, is his perception of me so distorted by his own tastes that he is simply recommending a game to a mirror and expecting me to be the reflection?
The Ghosting of Social Life
I recently ran into Sage C.-P., a graffiti removal specialist who spends their days scrubbing the impulsive decisions of strangers off of limestone walls. Sage told me that the hardest thing to remove isn’t the fresh paint, but the ghosting-the faint, stubborn outline of an image that has seeped into the pores of the stone over 49 years of neglect.
Ghost Outline
Clean Stone
Recommendations from friends are the ghosting of our social lives. They are the outlines of who we used to be, or who they need us to be so they don’t feel alone in their own obsessions. Sage uses chemicals that cost $79 a gallon to erase these ghosts, but there is no chemical for erasing the guilt of hating a game your best friend thinks is your ‘vibe.’
The Perception Gap: 499 Hours vs. 9 Minutes
499 Hrs
College Composite Sketch
9 Mins
Current Brain Craving
We often assume that intimacy equals insight. We believe that the more time someone spends in our orbit, the more accurately they can map our internal geography. But the opposite is frequently true. Proximity creates a blind spot. My friends don’t see my current tastes; they see a composite sketch of every version of me they’ve ever known. They are recommending games to a ghost.
I spent 59 minutes yesterday trying to organize a digital inventory in ‘Star-Bound Drifters,’ and I felt my blood pressure rise to a level that felt medically significant. Why am I doing this? I am doing it because I value the friendship more than I value my free time, which is a recipe for a very specific type of misery. We are told that sharing interests is the bedrock of connection, but there is a profound beauty in having absolutely no overlap in taste. There is safety in a friend who knows you hate everything they love. It removes the pressure of the performance.
When you are forced into the ecosystem of ‘you have to try this,’ the friendship ceases to be a refuge and becomes a chore.
When you are forced into the ems89 world of ‘you have to try this,’ the friendship ceases to be a refuge and becomes a chore.
The Lie of Preservation
Contradictory as it sounds, I will probably keep playing it for another 9 days. I will lie and say I’m ‘getting into the rhythm of it.’ I will criticize the crafting system just enough to sound like I’m engaging with it, but not enough to hurt his feelings. And this is the ultimate failure of the ‘intimacy equals insight’ myth: it forces us to become liars to protect the very intimacy that is being mismanaged. We pretend to like the artisanal mud because we want to be the person our friends think we are. We are terrified that if we admit we hate the game, we are admitting that the bridge between us is 19 miles shorter than we thought.
Visceral Rejection
Games are not like movies or books; they are systems you must inhabit. Every time the controls don’t respond the way your brain expects, you are reminded of the disconnect. It’s a visceral, physiological rejection.
It is a failure of empathy disguised as an act of generosity.
The Comfort of Unknowability
Perhaps we should admit that we are all unknowable. Even after 29 years of friendship, I am still a black box to David, and he is a black box to me. That should be celebrated. The fact that he can still surprise me with how wrong he is about my tastes is a testament to the fact that I haven’t been fully colonized by his expectations.
Sage C.-P. once told me that sometimes, the only way to save a wall is to let the graffiti stay until it fades naturally. If you scrub too hard, you destroy the surface. Maybe I just need to let the recommendation fade. I can move on to the games that actually make me feel alive, the ones that nobody recommended, the ones I found in the dark, by myself.
The Final Realization
In the end, the horror isn’t the game itself. The horror is the mirror. It’s a reminder of our fundamental loneliness.
Is it possible to love someone and still think their taste is absolute garbage? Of course. In fact, it might be the highest form of love.
To look at the 9-foot eye on your wall and say, ‘I hate this, but I’m glad you wanted me to see it.’ That is the only way forward. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some graffiti to remove.