Crisis, Despair, Isolation, and Skype

In 2013, the absolute worst thing to happen to a young Christopher Conway occurred: he had to go to sixth grade. Now, this would not have been as big of a deal as middle-school age novels made it out to be, except for the fact that I had to leave the system that I went to elementary school in. I went to a small private elementary school (around 100 kids in K-5) named Thackston my entire elementary career, and with this, I was around the exact same group of kids every single day for the entirety of my remembered life until I was 11. Therefore, I was absolutely distraught regarding the idea of going to school without my core friend group of my boys Campbell, Whit, and Jackson (+ a few others we picked up along the way). Pictured here

These are the homies since day 1, and I love these guys more than almost anyone in the world. So we can all clearly see my issue.

However, this is where gaming comes into play. See at the time, we were all obsessed with what every single child in the early 2010s was: Minecraft. This was absolutely great (and if you read my second blog in two weeks I will explain our favorite thing to do), but we came across a simple problem. We had no idea how to communicate with each other while we played. Beforehand, it was more of a play-at-home and then talk-about-it-at-school kind of arrangement, but now we did not have that option. You wanna know what we decided? We tried to group call on a super old landline that looked like this:

How do you think that went?

The answer is terribly for all those playing along at home, and I reached the lowest of the low in my story. I thought we were all going to grow apart and I was never going to see these guys again. That is when the hero of this story enters: my mother. I was particularly bummed one sunny tuesday evening and explained my phone-woes, and she said three words I will never forget: Try Skyping them.

“HUH?” is what my peabrain said. Outwardly though, I said “Mom, what is Skype” That is when I learned about the sweet sweet programs whose purpose was solely to make calls online. Now this was before Microsoft acquired Skype, so it was still a good program, and we were absolutely LIVING. We played Minecraft every day after school, and it was one of my favorite times ever in my life because it was so innocent and pure.

As I have grown up, the group of guys I play with have moved to Discord instead and onto more recent games like League of Legends and Fortnite. However, through the years I have come to realize that it was never really the game that mattered. We had downloaded hundreds of games trying to find ones that we enjoyed and wanted to keep playing, and every single time, I was so focused on the game without realizing I was missing the most important point. I was playing with my best friends in the world at a time where I had literally nothing else to worry about. If that doesn’t leave you with any smidge of nostalgia, maybe this classic sound will:

See yall in a couple weeks

-Chris