So far this year the main issue students have been facing is separation. Separation from our friends and the ones who we can trust and enjoy. Well, that has been taken away from us. This isn’t any ordinary separation, it’s separation of people we enjoy to be with, but now we have been confined into a single household. There isn’t much room for hanging out with them anymore. Fortunately we have online devices to retain our former connections whether it be through online school or face timing. For me, I connect to my friends through Discord. Discord is a downloadable app that can be used for servers with different chats. I created a school server centering around a video game, Among Us, that has been blowing up in popularity recently.
Among Us is a team work game that has 8 people as the crewmate and they have to complete tasks across the ship. However, 2 people are the imposters and their goal is to get rid of the crewmates. When it comes time to vote someone out of the ship, it depends on the player’s own wits to find out who the imposter is. A better explanation of the rules has been made into a video presented by Brayden Appell that can be found on the Spyglass website. Anyways, the crown jewel of this game is the emergency meeting where players can argue their positions and lay out evidence to others if they were innocent or not. Sometimes this can turn into arguments between players, but that’s the point. It’s to have a mental debate between people using skills such as deception, persuasion, and being communicative. Even if this sounds like friends getting into arguments, it ends actually increasing that connection between them. I reached out to the Discord server asking them how ironically arguing can increase our relationships as Senior Brendon Costa responds with “ We all have a group understanding of a player’s accomplishment and acknowledging that.” As long as praise is given for the winning player in regards to what they did that game, then satisfaction is achieved from the minority to the majority. Of course rarely sometimes things can get heated between players, but “In the end it’s just a game and that’s the fun part of it.”
Mainly the Discord server is dedicated to playing Among Us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything else. Within the Discord server we have different chat rooms that are associated with different subjects whether it be for other games or general talking. Usually when we play we join a chat room where we can talk directly to each other, but sometimes we decide to not play and just talk. We turn our cameras on and have a conversation amongst each other telling comedic stories as well as helping watch others with problems or any other issue. Thus we have created a community. Now it isn’t exactly what we had at school, but it’s the best we got and being able to see our own faces reacting through the screen is worth it. “Mainly you will always have someone to hangout and talk to,” says Senior Jaden Cooper, “It’s the easiest thing we can do now.”
Through the use of this public Discord as well as the memorable experiences with Among Us, this has been an escape for me and many other locals from this excruciatingly long pandemic. So far relationships between friends have been able to be kept up and become stronger as well as creating new friendships. Through this Discord experience, the return to normal society might be an easier path.
nel looking kinda sus