On the nature of friendship…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So there\u2019s this game that I play on my phone\u2026 it\u2019s kind of a cross between geocaching and capture the flag, with two global teams and a big in-person social component. (Hang in there, non-Ingressers\u2026 I see you rolling your eyes and I promise this post isn\u2019t really <\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the months that I\u2019ve been playing, one of the best things about Ingress has been the people I\u2019ve met and the new friends that I\u2019ve made. I didn\u2019t really expect my teammates to turn into anything more than passing acquaintances\u2026 people to have a beer with or go on missions with, but not \u201creal\u201d friends, for lack of a better term. I didn\u2019t expect to find people that I could talk to about absolutely anything\u2026 people who\u2019d become part of my day-to-day life in more than just playing the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n I mean, part of being an adult is realizing that elementary-school-style BFFs don\u2019t really last forever, and a lot of \u201cfriends” will be made around common interests, and when that common ground goes away, the friends just drift away too\u2026 Sometimes it happens immediately, and sometimes over a longer period of time, but it happens and you get used to it. And usually, those relationships are replaced by others as you find new places to go or things to be involved in (or change workplaces or churches or whatever else formed that common ground). I didn\u2019t expect this to be any different, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But then one day you realize that those interest-based friendships have transcended their point of origin, and it makes you start to think about the nature of friendship. I have friends that I met through the PetsForums on CompuServe, <\/p>\n\n\n\n And now there\u2019s Ingress, and suddenly I find myself with a whole new puddle of friends and acquaintances where our initial common ground was just this game that we play on our phones. But then some of us found we have more in common\u2026 and time together, whether in person or online, became increasingly more about the social interaction and less about the game\u2026 and suddenly I realized that I was pretty heavily invested in some of these friendships. Some of these people had become or were on the way to becoming real friends\u2026 not \u201cjust” Ingress friends. And that\u2019s a good thing… right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But something seems different about the Ingress (or maybe gaming in general?) dynamic and the other venues where I\u2019ve made friends. Something about these friendships seems more fragile\u2026 more tenuous\u2026 possibly more transitory. Or maybe it\u2019s just because they started so fast and it\u2019s still been a (relatively) short period of time (I just started playing in January and started meeting people in the spring). So I started wondering\u2026 will these friendships outlive our shared interest in the game? Am I investing too heavily in friendships that could go away tomorrow? But life is boring if you don\u2019t take risks, so I made friends\u2026 and I let myself get attached\u2026 and I convinced myself that some of them weren\u2019t just \u201cIngress Friends.\u201d And then someone (who I\u2019d spent time with but who wasn\u2019t one of my closer Ingress friends) quit the game. Just disappeared for a couple of weeks, then resurfaced to announce that he was quitting, and then disappeared again from the usual online locations. And that\u2019s perfectly okay, because sometimes RealLife really needs our attention and the best way to do that is to drop the game. And I get that the easiest way to extract yourself from something (especially something as all-consuming as Ingress can be) is just to make a complete break, at least in the short term. But it shook me. If he could just disappear, could the same thing happen with some of the people I\u2019d gotten closer to?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n And I realized that I really don\u2019t want that to happen. And that the first step to making sure that doesn\u2019t happen is probably to have conversations that start with something along the lines of \u201cHey\u2026 I want you to know that even if one of us leaves the game, I hope we can still be friends. Because I don\u2019t want to lose you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or heck, maybe I\u2019ll just send this post.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n #ingress \u00a0 #friendship \u00a0 #justagame \u00a0 #notjustagame \u00a0<\/p>\n\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the nature of friendship…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[72,39,73,74],"class_list":["post-455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friendship","tag-ingress","tag-justagame","tag-notjustagame"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reddogs.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}