Online lobbies are cool and fascinating
I grew up on the internet. And while that means that I am a part of the generation of Fortnite players that everyone calls "Gen-Z", it also means that I have spent my fair share of time in public online lobby's. As a young young boy, I loved to spend time, for whatever reason, in areas like Team Fortress 2's custom trade and deathrun servers, to roblox murder lobbys and Garry's mod various gamemode servers (yes that includes dark rp). I spent countless hours in these public lobbies with players that I didn't even remotely know or would ever know.
During the lonely quarantine years, I picked up this new kind of hobby, one which I never thought I would have ever considered prior to this; I began playing a game by the name of VRChat. Now, part of me is still embarrassed by it. I don't know, maybe the notion of stating that you like to kill your free time by hanging with the furry population doesn't bode well for your reputation. But, it actually was really enjoyable! I began to yearn every night to head home and hop back in to play a fun game with strangers, and laugh and chat and party all night. It was enthralling, but also quite addicting. At one point, I had reached over 120 hours in two weeks! That's 8 hours a day!! Which I didn't even know was possible, but whatever.
And so I would spend time in all these public lobbies and hang out, meet new people, and have good times. In my perspective, I think this is crazy! All of those people, each night a new set of individuals, all together in the lobby just sharing a good time. Pausing other things for a while to have some good ol' fashioned fun. It's crazy to think of all the people in these lobbies. Like, each one is a whole. person. A person with a whole life behind their online personas, a life filled with so many things, that you could never understand it all if you tried. This is the true beauty of the internet, it's this unimaginably complex interconnected system of systems of systems that we use to connect us all. Obviously, the internet is for all other kinds of things to, but it allows many to have these rare, late night experiences and really get a kind of human connection that is so unique and raw even though all you see is an avatar on a screen.
If you want to see what I mean, go to a VRChat or Team Fortress 2 Custom lobby, the cringier the better. Its bizarre but fascinating to think that people will play these servers all the time. Like there are some that log in to the server, even if they are doing something else, just to be on the server. They might have it on the background and only come back on when they respawn, they just always are on. Look for the people who know eachother, cus there are ALWAYS some that know eachother. A group of friends hopping on together for the night, a reunion of two old gaming buds, and sometimes the kinds gross E-couple. Well, every rose has it's thorns. But each of these players have a massive amount of history, each having racked up hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS of hours on this and other games like it. Maybe it's a TF2 Deathrun server player: They know each map like the back of their hand, they've played countless games with countless people. And each day, they have a new experience on the server. Or maybe a typical routine VRChat player: Hopping on every night to play, hanging out in a Murder lobby for the night, and maybe they might make a new friend and go on this elaborate one-night journey with them, or hang out with an old friend of theirs and go way back and share life stories and funny anecdotes and laugh and reminisce. Okay... maybe a bit of that was a bit notstalgia driven, but the point stands there.
Public internet lobbies are exactly what makes the internet so cool to me. It's a place to chill out, mess around, have fun, and be yourself. But also, it's a place to have experiences. Experiences like no other thing you could ever get in the real world. And if you decide to shoot that stranger a friend request, you might just find a little more.