Chapter 1: Just a Game

Two minutes left in the fourth. Down by six. Ninety-four yards to the goal line. I’ve got this.

“Can you hurry your ass?”

Miguel hovered impatiently behind me. I could feel his annoyed eyes on the back of my head.

“No,” I insisted. “I’m two minutes away from the playoffs. A field goal won’t do it. I have to execute.”

“Nate, it’s just a game.”

I hate those words and had all my life. Yahtzee’s a game. Uno’s a game. This was something else entirely, indicated by my elevated heartrate, sweaty palms, and shallow breathing. Battleship never made me feel like I was about to pass out.

Plus, who was he to criticize?

“You and I play games all the time,” I responded. “We spent seventeen hours straight yesterday looking for the Sword of Destiny.”

“Dude. When you say it like that, it sounds stupid,” he responded, with more than a little embarrassment. He then pivoted to concern: “Don’t bring that talk to the bar. I want to hook up tonight. You need to hook up tonight.”

I could hear him checking his phone, probably seeing if he had matched on any apps. He was the only hard-core gamer I knew who spent this much time trying to pick up women. Personally, I hadn’t shaved in a week, and my neck beard was dangerously close to connecting to my chest hair.

“I don’t want to hook up,” I assured him. “I want to close out this amazing comeback and make the playoffs.”

Miguel took a deep breath.

“First of all, you do want to hook up. Everyone wants to hook up. It’s called being alive,” he stated calmly. “Second, if we leave now, we can catch the end of the actual football game while drinking beer and chatting up the waitress. In real life.”

IRL. My brain had started to equate it with everything annoying and stressful and boring – which is why my couch had this ultra comfortable ass indentation. We were almost one now, and it was a beautiful marriage so far.

“Why is real life suddenly better than gaming?” I asked, both offended and annoyed. “We’ve been doing this since we were eight. We still do it at twenty-eight. You love games.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“I love real games. Not sports sims.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, actually turning away from the screen.

“The difference is that in real life, you don’t get to set orcs on fire,” he said flatly. “So I do that in awesome fantasy settings while getting lost in a world absolutely nothing like our own. That is a worthwhile hobby.”

Hobby. I had left that level of gaming behind a long time ago.

“Presumably, if you could set orcs on fire in real life, you’d stop playing the game?” I asked.

Miguel paused, like I had just asked him to choose a favorite parent.

“Absolutely,” he answered finally. “Instead, I would, at this very moment, be watching ‘Orc Battles’ on ESPN. It would be the pinnacle of sports television.”

He seemed almost sad that the show didn’t exist.

“And seriously, let’s go,” he said, the irritation rising in his voice. “Wouldn’t you rather watch the end of the actual game?”

“No,” I assured him. “Because in actual football games, the guys on the TV don’t do what I tell them to. But here, pressing the ‘stiff-arm that guy in the face’ button results in a guy getting stiff-armed in the face. It’s very satisfying.”

I tried a sitting Heisman pose, which is exactly as elegant as it sounds.

“Plus,” I continued, “you’re not even gonna watch the game. You’re going to talk to your tech bros in nonsense jargon I don’t understand and stare at the waitress so hard she stops coming to our table.”

“Once,” he insisted through gritted teeth. “Once she stopped coming to the table.”

And I apologized,” he said, perking up. “I now make 94% more eye contact. Stacy has completely forgiven me. She loves me!”

She actually kind of did – which was infuriating. He was a god damn Latin Abercrombie & Fitch model while my white trash beer belly had recently forced me to buy new sweats.

“Would you please let me focus,” I pleaded, with way too much whining in my voice.

“Bro, take a shower. Shave. Put on clean clothes. It’s bad enough you still live with your parents.”

“I live near my parents.”

“It’s their garage!”

“Detached. Detached garage. I have my own door.”

“Please don’t brag about that,” he almost whispered. “Don’t ever say those words to another human being again. You make sad even sadder.”

He was right. We had both graduated from college six years ago, but our lives had diverged dramatically. While I was bragging about getting my own door, my best friend since elementary school was a Silicon Valley success, living in an amazing condo overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, and still finding time to be better than me at RPGs – our last connection.

I let myself linger on my depression a moment too long. While caught up in self-loathing, I missed an open receiver…in the end zone…on fourth down.

Game over.

“Thanks man! I just blew it. Damn it! I’m gonna lose half of my offense to free agency. Next season will be a total rebuild.”

“Ughh. Now you’re even worse. You turn gaming into work. It’s like you’re running a business.”

“You run a business,” I said flatly.

“For money. Not for fun.”

“Well, it’s fun to manage my cap space and build a winning team. And this was my window. But your lecturing screwed me up.”

I was legitimately pissed off. Sports games were mine. It was the one thing I had been beating him at for two decades.

“Just reset it.”

Blasphemy!

I was genuinely shocked.

“You didn’t just say that. I know you didn’t say that,” I said, dropping the controller. “If we don’t live with the actual outcomes of our actions, then it truly is just a game.”

Which would, of course, mean my life really was meaningless.