UFO 50 and my running group

I joined a running group recently. Every Wednesday night, we run a 10k through town. It’s a confusing loop, at least to a beginner (well, at least to me), but thankfully a few very kind folks have slowed down their typical pace to see me through the course as I learn it. I’ve since mapped out the route on my phone, which will sync to my watch and guide me through the loop until I have it memorized. That way, should I need to go it alone, I won’t need anyone to guide me along the path. But in doing so, I realized this was kind of defeating the purpose. Like, entirely.

I’m a pretty solitary guy, all told. I’m married, so I’m not entirely solitary, of course, but my wife and I are both writers, so we both value solitude on a pretty fundamental level. (Our dog, less so. Hi, Fraya.) I also work remotely, and, as you know, my main hobby (besides running) is playing videogames.

I’ve always been a single-player kind guy. Or so I believed. It’s something I tell myself, at least. But looking back on my history with games, while I’ve always enjoyed long, solitary experiences, my childhood and early adulthood were peppered with plenty of multiplayer games. In reality, it wasn’t until after college that I more or less exclusively played single-player games. It doesn’t take a detective to suss out why. Gone were the days of going over to your friend’s dad’s house and playing Mario Party 2 on the N64. Say goodbye to Rock Band in your parents’ basement. Farewell, too, to college Smash. Online games exist, sure, but when you grew up in the nineties and aughts, there isn’t much that can replace that feeling of punching your friend in the arm after they whooped your ass in Mario Kart. Looking back on it more honestly, I realized that some of my most formative gaming memories were, in fact, social memories.

These days, though, I’ve been finding that some of my gaming time was making me feel lonely. It doesn’t help that I’ve been playing extremely long games and/or falling prey to additive loops. Still, as our regular D&D group fell prey to the thing that all regular D&D groups with members in their mid- to late-thirties fall prey to (life), I found myself feeling more frequently that my gaming time was draining me more than it was reviving me.

Not to write about the election, but to write about the election: In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s reelection, I find myself feeling, in addition to sorrow, a conviction that I cannot again live the way I lived from 2016 to 2020. This is, of course, both a privileged statement to make and, in all likelihood, folly. I am not separate from history any more than you, wherever you are and whomever you are. What I mean is not that I am going to somehow be above it all (I am not), but that I need new mechanisms by which to survive. I need new mechanisms by which to live.

The weekend after the election, my longtime friend (and Backlog contributor) Nicole visited. We all spent time (Fraya included) just hanging out, catching up, chilling. I cooked, which I enjoy doing, especially for visitors. I made coffee in the obnoxious way I make coffee (shout out to my fellow pour-over freaks). We went on a (cold) hike. But, nerds being nerds, we also played videogames. Chiefly, UFO 50.

I have to admit, after reviewing it for Polygon, I haven’t much returned to UFO 50. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to—it remains an expansive ode to an era of gaming that predates my own life, yet feels resonant to me, even so—but that there’s just so much to play (I’m looking at you, the 25 hours of Metaphor ReFantazio I’ve managed to fit in). These days, between Backlog and my current monthly column over at Polygon, novelty is paramount when it comes to the free time I spend playing games. In order to write new things, I must play new things, right? It has become my routine over the past three years to move on from experiences once I’ve written about them, and UFO 50 was no different.

But then Nicole asked whether we could play it, since my review had made it sound cool. So of course we had to play it, because who is going to deny a friend an experience of playing something that you made sound cool? Such a thing would be monstrous.

I think it’s a blessing that UFO 50 does not, at the time of writing, support online play. Putting aside my feelings about how that would disrupt the game’s metafictional conceit, on a more basic level, it’s just a game meant to be played in proximity with another person. We dug into individual games in UFO 50 that I spent comparatively little time on during the review period, and with the benefit of two people’s perspectives trying to figure out their intricacies, we discovered their depths much more easily than I had alone. Games that were kind of okay single-player ended up being an absolute joy in multiplayer. She even got to poke around with some of the single-player games, and watching her enjoy them made me feel even more warmly to the package than I already did.

Sharing is the word that came to mind while we sat there playing these made-up 80s games. At its best, playing games online feels like connecting. The distance between A and B is collapsed. A living room is connected to another living room. But when you are in the same space together, something else happens that goes beyond just simply playing a game together. Like the aforementioned memories of my friend’s dad’s living room, or the college dorm I can picture so clearly in my mind, a certain kind of memory linkage occurs when you not only play a game together, but share it together in a physical space. UFO 50 has gone from being something I played over a week and wrote about to something linked to my friend of almost two decades. It becomes something linked to the feeling of that weekend—a joyful reminder of the importance of togetherness—and transcends its nature as simply one game that was released this past year that I played. It goes from something solitary into something shared, and in doing so, something much more wonderful.

As we prepare for what will undoubtedly be a chaotic and harrowing series of years, whether it is running alongside other people through a series of confusing turns, or beating a game in UFO 50 in one sitting with Nicole, I’m reminded that I need other people. Other people who will run alongside me, who will face the challenges together. Other people on whom I can count, and who can count on me.

Be well, readers. Take care of each other, and take care of yourselves. Play, and if you can, play together.